Many of the downsides you mentioned about TR being bad, aside from having more Protect users, aren't really CAP-specific, and yet that isn't preventing NDM from utilising Trick Room in Ubers, not as an OTR tool, but as a semi-common tool nonetheless.In CAP, choosing trick room is fundamentally impossible. Let's quickly go through all the hoops and hurdles a trick room mon has to pass through in a modern gen:
Now let's look at trick room's advantages over other speed control options:
- Protect, which is more prevalent in cap than ou (see
,
,
, and
), can be alternated and cuts trick room's duration in half.
- Substitute is protect but worse.
- Sacking pokemon kills one turn of trick room.
- Predictive switches can decrease the trick room counter by one turn; see
's 50/50's between a ghost type and a flying type.
- Stupidly fat mons with reliable recovery can stall away the trick room.
- Phazing denies trick room to begin with.
- Extremely slow pokemon, like hatterenne, are problematic unless we have shuckle speed.
- Priority completely invalidates the whole point of trick room, and CAP is infested with priority.
- Trick room is ONLY used for speed control; it's similar to agility which has hardly any usage. This means you still have to cram boosting and may run out of moveslots.
- Even in ideal conditions, you still only get a 4 turn long sweep.
Trick room is fundamentally terrible. I'm advocating for calyrex-ice, the "obvious" path forwards, because it's the ONLY way forwards with offensive trick room. If you give CAP 39 a trick room mode and even the slightest inkling of another playstyle, it will take the inkling any day of the week. Trick room is just that bad. CAP 39 cannot be allowed a choice. Offensive trick room is trying to jam an ubers' playsyle onto a CAPmon in a tier where it doesn't fit, and that feels very pro-concept to me. It may be heavy-handed, but in this case, circling around both trick room and another option is bound to lead to failure on the trick room build.
- If you die the room might still be there for a turn or so for your teammates.
- You outspeed scarf pokemon.
If people are of the opinion that offensive trick room just can't work in CAP, I understand, but thinking that we can fit an offensive trick room build and anything else onto the same pokemon is just biting off more than a cap can physically chew.
I would like to caveat all of this by saying that necrozma-dusk mane is still a decent pick, but focusing on offensive trick room with it is a mistake.
I acknowledge that I probably have a more abstract way of looking at a mini-NDM than other proponents of NDM do. I'm less interested in reproducing everything that makes NDM successful and more interested in how NDM uses TR, in that it is a "fast" TR user that can doesn't always need TR up.
As I mentioned earlier, NDM being functional at min speed, base speed, and boosted speed is very unique to it, and we probably can't replicate all of these because NDM is heavily carried by its stats. However, I think even just getting it to work at base speed & min speed as a self-TR user is unique enough on its own. NDM uses SD + TR as a pseudo-double dance as a unique way to flip matchups rather than a way to become unstoppable. It's a unique way of using TR in singles that, as far as I'm aware, only NDM and UUbers TR Dialga have consistently been able to pull off.
I think this is where my understanding of the concept assignment differs. I'm not thinking of taking an Uber and scaling down its most commonly used set. Instead, I'm conceptualising bringing a unique playstyle that a current Uber uses into a lower-powered format, then reverse-engineering it into something that is actually optimised around that playstyle. I think the way NDM uses TR is distinctive enough to serve as the centre of the concept.
Edit:
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the concept assignment. But I'm specifically looking at this part:
Edit 2:
In essence, I’m trying to build something that enables soft Trick Room in a format where TR is usually used only as HO hard trick room. I remembered seeing an Iron Valiant soft Trick Room team in SV OU and it was honestly one of the coolest team ever, so I was hoping there’s something that could bring the playstyle to CAP proper.
But of course, after thinking about it for a while longer, it is definitely a challenge to succeed with a direction like that and I’m going to acknowledge that.
Last edited:
to function as both a TR and DD sweeper is how linear the speed tiers in Ubers are. Base 77 is far enough below the average 90-100 that it can go in either direction, while CAP and OU feature a wider and more specific selection of speed. Base 77 is sitting in a really bad area where it can't commit to either without coming up short, 
sort of has this problem.
. This is all given the mon has enough offensive pressure to grab these boosts and possesses the requisite coverage to make them effective.
's sets in SSOU, and to a lesser extent ubers are super super cool and should be considered. This is not your momma's "versatile" mon. This is a mon that either kills you right now or kills herself (with high jump kick). This is a pokemon that can maybe take a single resisted hit, and if said resisted hit is too strong she dies anyways. You might ask why not Deo-A, and I'll argue that the ability to not die to a resisted hit (from a defensive mon) is compelling in a way that Deo-A's ability to die to uninvested Seismic Toss isn't.
got a TON of discussion on discord with basically no submission here so I'll get a quick explanation up for what it does:
would be a good actualization for resisting revenankh's drain punch and hemo's extreme speed while clearing hazards, but it has reliable recovery and spin over defog. Probably the best analogue, 
, was mentioned by quziel, as it is a defogger, status spreader, and poor recovery wall, that counters a few powerful metagame threats.
