Can we ban Cramorant? Is more dangerous that a Dynamax Calyrex-Shadow with +6 Special Atk and Mold Breaker under Psychic Terrain
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That Calyrex-Shadow set you said dies to a banded sucker punch. Similarly, Cramorant has very simple counters/checks.Can we ban Cramorant? Is more dangerous that a Dynamax Calyrex-Shadow with +6 special atk and Mold Breaker
Most of the Gambit HO teams you've seen on ladder are just meme teams created for goofing off on ladder. It's been shown that Final Gambit HO is a valid and very deadly strat if built and used correctly. Both myself and Sugarhigh easily got into the top 10 with Final Gambit Spam teams and the strat was used extensively in the ompl tournament.The regular HO bellydrum + final gambit on the other hand is more "fish" oriented as you need to final gambit the right pokemon and usually prankster pokemons aren't brought out unless you really have to. Final gambit can also backfire and I usually see people being stuck in the 1400s with such teams meanwhile with a team I listed above I usually see them in the 1600s.
Usually knock-off + purify is pretty decent although it's kinda niche. Another niche option is trick pecha berry although you probably want it on a steel type.does anyone know how to deal with Pheal semi-easily as I'm having trouble building around it without a decent sacrificing defensive/offensive presence
worry seed is very good, as it also helps if they try and swap out on the move as the opponet would lose their ability, I use a Ho-oh with nuzzle as well for alot of pressure in between the two movesdoes anyone know how to deal with Pheal semi-easily as I'm having trouble building around it without a decent sacrificing defensive/offensive presence
worry seed is very good, as it also helps if they try and swap out on the move as the opponet would lose their ability, I use a Ho-oh with nuzzle as well for alot of pressure in between the two moves
both of thanks for the helpUsually knock-off + purify is pretty decent although it's kinda niche. Another niche option is trick pecha berry although you probably want it on a steel type.
Otherwise entrainment, worry seed, core enforcer should be good enough for non-niche uses as well.
HAHAHA Jezz yeah I hate so much your Ho-Oh I can't switch safelyworry seed is very good, as it also helps if they try and swap out on the move as the opponet would lose their ability, I use a Ho-oh with nuzzle as well for alot of pressure in between the two moves
bro even i hate it, the second it gets impostered i go ballisticHAHAHA Jezz yeah I hate so much your Ho-Oh I can't switch safely
This question is far too vague. There are several styles of hyper offense and neither of them will have true counters as each battle is matchup dependent. Imposter users and Prankster Haze support are definitely some of the best blanket checks to offensive teams, but these really shine brightest when facing random setup spam that you might encounter on the ladder.What are the greatest counters to Hyper Offense?
You run purify alongside knock off to permanently cripple poison heal monsWhy do people run Purify on mons? Isn't it just worse Recover that also helps your opponent? Like I guess it could stop some Poison Heal/ guts mons but they would just get statused again the next turn.
prankster mons might prefer to use corrosive gas over koff for the priority boostYou run purify alongside knock off to permanently cripple poison heal mons
I'm sure plenty of people feel this way as I myself tend to get frustrated building around cramorant, but the reality is there's still a lot that makes cramorant far from overpowerful or over centralizing.I'm gonna say it...
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the bird is a problem
From lurking on the bh discords this is a sentiment that appears very widespread and I wholeheartedly agree. Whenever you see the blue bird in preview and you didn't bring aroma or 3+ phealers/zekrom/jungle healing your heart just sinks for the RNGfest that's about to ensue. But there seems to be an agreement that cram isn't truly broken in a winrate sense, but rather it just feels wrong on a competitive level. I'm not sure how to compellingly make that argument but here's some points about it that I think are problematic and will hopefully prompt further discussion:
1) The counterplay to cram is pretty much entirely in the builder. If your offensive mon doesn't have one of the above qualities (pheal, jungle healing, zekrom, aroma support, or misty terrain support which is fringe), your opponent can very easily put you in a position where your guy just has to take a para to make any progress. There's no real in-game counterplay. You can try to get to rocks up and double out on cram to your threatening phealer a bunch of times but a good chunk of them carry boots anyway and you will have to play extremely precisely to prevent it from ever healing back up (unless you get a lucky matchup where they're running sap cram and you have a bouncer). All this means that as teams prepare for cram more and more it ends up feeling like a very matchup-fishy pick because its ability to effectively spread paras is almost entirely dependent on your opponent's team structure.
2) A lot of the builder counterplay is not good against non-cram teams. Jungle healing on zac-c comes with a huge opportunity cost and no one would run it if cram wasn't in the meta. Post-beak ban Zekrom is just a pretty mediocre mon that struggles with zamac and is outperformed heavily by other guys in the tier. Despite the prevalence of cram many teams made by competent players without a phealer will go without aroma because it is still just so hard to fit, especially on offense. Running only phealers as your offensive core is very constricting and doesn't even solve the cram problem for your defensive guys*. Using suboptimal techs to deal with specific mons is nothing new in pokemon and it alone isn't a sign of an unhealthy metagame but it absolutely does contribute to the feelings of matchup-fishing associated with cram when you bring these techs against a team without it.
*very minor point but i kinda hate how using a single phealer on teams feels really bad rn, because then you can't run aroma and you are just leaving the rest of your guys to get paralyzed by the bird
3) full paras are so dumb. Like I think on principle if there was a hypothetical viable ability that caused your opponent's move to fail x% of the time while it was on the field it would be banned. Across tiers the counterplay to mitigate to impact of para rng is to either bring in a mon that is immune to the para or designate a sponge that can still fulfill its role in the matchup to a reasonable degree even if some of its moves do not work. Without that latter form of counterplay you are just left in a situation where your guys who can't actually perform their role if their moves don't go through end up taking it because you have no choice, which leads to paras deciding games significantly more often than simply nuzzle/glare.
this was a bit long and if I had more time it would have been shorter but those are my main thoughts
I fully agree saccing your usless mons for the specific matchup is the best way to counter final gambit and will hand you the win more often than not, but that assumes that 1 you saw the final gambit coming, 2 you correctly guessed your opponents remaining sets and possibly 3 you have the favorable match up on the first non-gambit turn.personally i am not very concerned about gambit. the part i mainly took issue with in that post was "skill is barely needed and the winner is decided based on what matchup is left at the end of the gambits". if you're facing hyper offense with a bunch of scarf high hp mons or whatever, just trade away your bad pokemon so you're left with better ones for the matchup. because of this it's hard for me to really get on board with this argument.
as for other miscellaneous gambit uses like dmaw etern removing zamac or something, that's fair but at the same time you're still trading away one of your strongest breakers. i think this is much less problematic than other ways of bypassing counters; if zacc whips out rend to own a volt absorb hooh or something and have a much easier time later, that feels more unbalanced and unfair to me than etern literally sacrificing itself to invest harder in something else (and etern still needs quite a bit of support, to be clear).
i have a few arguments about cram, ill try to make this coherent but this pokemon isnt very easy to talk about in terms of what it does to the meta so my apologies if it doesnt come out that well
probably my biggest issue with cram is that i feel like it just invalidates otherwise great pokemon like non prank zamac. first of all let me establish that "reacting" to cram as zamac literally does not work, you can't recover and heal bell in 1 turn so he just hops out and you're just completely losing. anyway, i feel like zamac being able to freely throw out attacks is really healthy for the meta. by correctly using moves like knock, spectral, anchor, and fighting moves zamac is able to establish a pattern of minor chip damage on opposing pokemon which in turn shapes the gameplan for both players similar to pawns in chess. (status like burn and toxic is healthy for similar reasons, which is why i'm not a fan of the push towards status protection.)
basically what i mean by this is that any attack by a pokemon that isn't cram resistant has to be incredibly direct and straightforward cause otherwise you just get owned. i kind of miss stuff like throwing out spectrals that pose a very low threat level but can open things up for your other guys, the game feels a lot less deep without em. this is why i'd probably vote to eject this guy from the meta if it came to that.
while i do agree with you, the bird is quite annoying to play against, I do think there are plenty of counters that should be expiremented with alot more than they do right now. I have been testing around with magic guard sets, speciffically the ones by sweet jesus higher up on this page. Volt tackle is very powerful and it's only weakness being the recoil, which is mitigated by magic guard, on top of that the user is unable to be poisoned or hurt by hazards, something that makes it very difficult to swap into cramorant.I'm gonna say it...
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.
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the bird is a problem
From lurking on the bh discords this is a sentiment that appears very widespread and I wholeheartedly agree. Whenever you see the blue bird in preview and you didn't bring aroma or 3+ phealers/zekrom/jungle healing your heart just sinks for the RNGfest that's about to ensue. But there seems to be an agreement that cram isn't truly broken in a winrate sense, but rather it just feels wrong on a competitive level. I'm not sure how to compellingly make that argument but here's some points about it that I think are problematic and will hopefully prompt further discussion:
1) The counterplay to cram is pretty much entirely in the builder. If your offensive mon doesn't have one of the above qualities (pheal, jungle healing, zekrom, aroma support, or misty terrain support which is fringe), your opponent can very easily put you in a position where your guy just has to take a para to make any progress. There's no real in-game counterplay. You can try to get to rocks up and double out on cram to your threatening phealer a bunch of times but a good chunk of them carry boots anyway and you will have to play extremely precisely to prevent it from ever healing back up (unless you get a lucky matchup where they're running sap cram and you have a bouncer). All this means that as teams prepare for cram more and more it ends up feeling like a very matchup-fishy pick because its ability to effectively spread paras is almost entirely dependent on your opponent's team structure.
2) A lot of the builder counterplay is not good against non-cram teams. Jungle healing on zac-c comes with a huge opportunity cost and no one would run it if cram wasn't in the meta. Post-beak ban Zekrom is just a pretty mediocre mon that struggles with zamac and is outperformed heavily by other guys in the tier. Despite the prevalence of cram many teams made by competent players without a phealer will go without aroma because it is still just so hard to fit, especially on offense. Running only phealers as your offensive core is very constricting and doesn't even solve the cram problem for your defensive guys*. Using suboptimal techs to deal with specific mons is nothing new in pokemon and it alone isn't a sign of an unhealthy metagame but it absolutely does contribute to the feelings of matchup-fishing associated with cram when you bring these techs against a team without it.
*very minor point but i kinda hate how using a single phealer on teams feels really bad rn, because then you can't run aroma and you are just leaving the rest of your guys to get paralyzed by the bird
3) full paras are so dumb. Like I think on principle if there was a hypothetical viable ability that caused your opponent's move to fail x% of the time while it was on the field it would be banned. Across tiers the counterplay to mitigate to impact of para rng is to either bring in a mon that is immune to the para or designate a sponge that can still fulfill its role in the matchup to a reasonable degree even if some of its moves do not work. Without that latter form of counterplay you are just left in a situation where your guys who can't actually perform their role if their moves don't go through end up taking it because you have no choice, which leads to paras deciding games significantly more often than simply nuzzle/glare.
this was a bit long and if I had more time it would have been shorter but those are my main thoughts
while i do agree with you, the bird is quite annoying to play against, I do think there are plenty of counters that should be expiremented with alot more than they do right now. I have been testing around with magic guard sets, speciffically the ones by sweet jesus higher up on this page. Volt tackle is very powerful and it's only weakness being the recoil, which is mitigated by magic guard, on top of that the user is unable to be poisoned or hurt by hazards, something that makes it very difficult to swap into cramorant.
Magic Guard I think is definitly something that is on the precipice of being quite powerful in the metagame as it really does just make certain setup strats impossible to pull off. Hazards are a nonfactor, meaning something like rapid spin and running a more offensive set packing maybe glacial lance, Volt tackle, rapid spin, and shore up? idk really I just wanna be able to utilize going into hazards with no threat. I think you might wanna try one of these sets, or a no guard set with zap cannon.
from what im understanding from these posts is that magic guard blocks gulp missile damage and electrics don't get parad (for the topic of this post anyway). so magic guard zekrom/thundurous/eleki/zeraora(an underused mon who has great potential) basically have immunity to crams main gimmick making them much better in a meta where cram is big threat and helps make them slightly more viable and can help skew them to be picked over other mons. if the meta shifts this way then cram might start getting paired with ground types or volt absorb making the enemy team more limited( but only slightly ) as it turns in a 6v4+ predictable set/mon+cram. and non of the electric types listed are particularly bad and can definitely be built with. if anyone wants to see a post where I go more in depth about this or someone else wants to make post about this than ill be more than happy to help if my schedule allows.Speaking to the people advocating for Magic Guard as a way to combat Cram: the bigger problem with Kram-g is the paralysis, not the 25% chip. Though Cram isn't broken, it definitely creates a huge number of 50-50s. Do I attack and get paralyzed or do I predict the switch to Cram, not attack. and lose a big chunk or all of my health? If that mon then is paralyzed, more 50-50's result, where you just have to hope that your mon can fight through the paralysis. This is a huge problem because not even Jungle Healing is guaranteed to work through Paralysis, meaning your para absorber might still lose if it gets fully paralyzed when it tries to use Jungle healing. That is why I believe that Cram-G is super uncompetitive.
But while it's still around, have some solid anti-Cram sets. These sets are viable even against teams without Cram which is why they're good.
Band Adapt Lando-t: Thousand Arrows ohkos Cram from full, and can easily be spammed against much of the rest of the meta. The only annoying part is that your Lando gets paralyzed, but you've also saved the rest of your team from being paralyzed. Lando is already fairly slow, even with Jolly, and the stuff that now outspeeds it after Para is still hit super hard by one of its standard moves, meaning that it might still be able to gain one more KO if it can come in safely next time.
PH Thunder Cage Xerneas: After a quiver dance boost, Xerneas ohkos Cram with Thunder Cage. Thunder Cage also gives you chip on common switchins like Tapu Fini, Zamazenta-C, And Ho-Oh. Other PH sweepers are of course good answers, but I wanted to highlight Xerneas here because the Pixilate set is currently taking much of the spotlight.
Water Absorb Magearna or Zacian: These mons are extremely useful since they can cripple Cram with Knock Off or trap it with Anchor Shot, and are immune to its most common pivoting move. Obviously you want to bring them in as Cram is recovering or doing some other utility that isn't flip turning, so they are surprised. These mons also protect you from the ravages of the deadly Palkia and the scary rain teams that you see occasionally.
Slow RegenVest Users: Pokemon like Dialga and Palkia can run Assault Vest sets that 2hKO Cram. Dialga's Volt Switch actually has a good chance to OHKO Cram, and the paralysis is tenable for them because they're already meant to be dirt slow anyway. Of course, you might still be unlucky with full paras, but that's just how it goes. Assault Vest mons also let you pivot around efficiently, and since the meta is very trap-heavy right now with threats such as Anchor Imprison Zacian everywhere, being able to just make them waste time is great.
Corrosive Gas: Prank users with this can often catch Crams on the switch, removing whatever item they're trying to use. Scarf Cram is especially cancerous because it can easily cripple multiple mons with the scarf and then with paralysis too. Even with the rise of trick immune mons such as Orb Giratina and itemless Groudon and Kyogre, Trick is another rampant problem that has the potential to create favorable matchups for the Trick user at low risk. Often, tricking the right mon can be even better than KOing it, because it generates way more free turns.
yeah i think we onto something, maybe something like volt tackle, head smash (I see ho-oh the most as a volt absorber, however any flying is good) volt switch maybe in case you want to predict switches and then a move of personal choice (i would run some water or ice move to counter grounds) on Zerora with life orb as magic guard blocks the damage from it if I remember correctly. I'm going to test this set later today with my main stall team and replace the ferrothorn. I'll check back to see if it goes well.from what im understanding from these posts is that magic guard blocks gulp missile damage and electrics don't get parad (for the topic of this post anyway). so magic guard zekrom/thundurous/eleki/zeraora(an underused mon who has great potential) basically have immunity to crams main gimmick making them much better in a meta where cram is big threat and helps make them slightly more viable and can help skew them to be picked over other mons. if the meta shifts this way then cram might start getting paired with ground types or volt absorb making the enemy team more limited( but only slightly ) as it turns in a 6v4+ predictable set/mon+cram. and non of the electric types listed are particularly bad and can definitely be built with. if anyone wants to see a post where I go more in depth about this or someone else wants to make post about this than ill be more than happy to help if my schedule allows.