Quick update on my streak since I reached a new milestone:
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This is what the team is currently, and that's definitely going to be the final version until Home, where I'll replace Ice Beam with Hurricane on Kingdra if by some miracle the streak is still ongoing:
The only real change since last time is Volt Switch > Extrasensory on Raikou, thanks to
Sirya providing me with one of his TMs.
I wouldn't say it's a minor change, Volt Switch makes a world of difference and opens up my options a lot on how to handle tougher matchups where I have to do a lot of switching, whether it be to change weather or switch back and forth between Raikou and Pelipper as resists to one another, baiting attacks. It also allows coming in on Slowbro-2, for example, get yawned on the switch, and OHKO Slowbro on my way out to not suffer the incoming sleep. While Scald was in my initial plans, every move on Raikou feels too important to give up right now, while Scald would be more of a luxury considering the frontline. Funnily, this makes Raikou end up with the exact same moveset Jolteon was running.
As my previous team reports mention, my hopes for this team weren't too high at first, it was put together pretty quickly, but as the streak kept rolling, I started to feel some pressure to take it more seriously; clearly, the team is pretty good, and I don't want the time I invested in it to just go to waste. I had several close calls and definitely some luck along the way on games I played sloppily, but around 300, I decided this streak was now too good to throw away, and I started putting effort into it.
I started taking notes of what trainer duos gave me trouble, any close calls, etc. and I spent actual hours (probably around 6-8 by now – it's still an ongoing process) purely theorymonning those matchups to find my best plays in advance. It's exhausting, and not particularly enjoyable to me, but the feeling of seeing a very convoluted plan to win regardless of hax actually work out through bad RNG is some of the most satisfying stuff I've experienced in facilities.
I spent a whopping 3.5 hours thinking about Dallin and Barret, which's team looked pretty easy to handle to me at first ("oh, Scizor just wins, let's find a way to SD and that should be it..."). After nearly losing to that team, I sat down and realized setting up a SD safely looked practically impossible. By the end, I ended up with this:
...I have yet to face them again, but now I can't wait.
I have now done the same for a lot more matchups, though the vast majority are much shorter because there are a lot less variables that matter. I'm using a spreadsheet that looks like this:
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I think in the long run, this will be key to the most successful streaks, not the sheet necessarily, but planning to try and mitigate all the RNG thrown our way. This might also be a little different for singles and doubles; while doubles often has the luxury of more leniency with suboptimal plays/teams because it has more ways to bait and buy free turns, finding the right line in a bad double-matchup tends to be more complex because more variables means there are many more ways it could go wrong, and perfectly safe plans become a lot more difficult to make. I assume planning singles matchups will be a bit more straightforward, but finding the right team for it might be less so.
Oh, by the way, see those numbers on the sheet? They're because of this:
I had the same feeling after ~200 battles, and
JustinTR also mentioned on Discord that he felt the repeats seemed too frequent to be a pool of this size. So I tracked all of my encounters, starting from 103 which is when I started recording (I went back through the VODs for previous ones).
As of now, I have the data from 336 non-boss encounters, and here are the stats:
- 128 unique trainer duos encountered. Unfortunately, I only recently started separating same duos using different teams, so 128 is truly the number of duos and not the number of different teams. Most have only 1, but some have 2 or even 3 possible teams.
- Of those 128, 31 were only encountered once, 36 were encountered twice, 26 were encountered thrice, 20 were encountered 4 times, 7 were were encountered 5 times, 4 were encountered 6 times, and Carlo/Cortney take the palm for being the only ones to challenge me 7 times.
I am no statistician, as a matter of fact I'm embarrassingly bad at math, so I'm not going to draw conclusions from it, I just wanted to share it so people who know what they're talking about can use it if they want.
However, it kind of
seems like those numbers make sense?
If they do add up with what we should be getting, then my theory as to why all of us had the impression of getting way more rematches is that there are a lot of similar names (there's an Andreas/Kristi team, and also an Andreas/Kristy team lol), and many of them are part of several duos, so we do see them a lot, with similar Pokémon, so they can start to blend together if you're not keeping track. That makes it so just a couple of genuine repeats can make you go "wow we're really just facing the same teams a lot!".
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I'm still updating
the YouTube playlist with the recording of the entire streak as I go, in case someone is curious to see the battles. From memory, the 420-427 leg was the most difficult/unlucky I faced, if any might serve for actual entertainment.
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Anyway, now that I've put many hours into properly figuring out lines of play for this team, I feel more committed, so I'll keep going with the big 1k in sight. I might slow down a bit though, because this is unironically happening now:
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(F) @ Focus Sash
(M) @ Life Orb
(F) @ Haban Berry
(M) @ Choice Band
