EVs for Middle-of-the-Road pokes

Shepard

I was going through all my EV-trained pokes from the 3rd gen today and deciding whether or not they need to be retrained. I have about 75, but they're from all different tiers (3rd gen tiers), with more than a few that were NU and UU. After lamenting many of their mediocre speed stats a thought struck me: is there any point in EV-training in speed for pokes you want to use in competitive play but which can't outstrip standards that are going to be seen all the time?

Lets use Arbok for an example. If you wanted to make a go of putting Arbok on a team used for competitive play, is it really worth putting 252 EVs into its speed if it's only going to get outstripped by the vast majority of standards? Sure with the advent of Choice Scarf pokes with a base speed of ~80 stand a chance to outrace some of the standard sweepers, and for that matter they can always have some speed BPed to them, but my question is that - barring those scenarios - is it more worthwhile to dump the EVs in HP rather than speed?

Any thoughts?
 
Depends. YOu want to put snough speed to Out speed what you want it to counter. Like....I can't remember a senerio, but yuou want Just enough speed to make sure you can out speed.
 
Well, since Arbok should ALWAYS run Glare, I don't really see the point in investing heavily in Speed EVs, if at all.
 
Not sure about Arbok 'cause of what Dan Dan said, but you generally with any pokemon want to run only the amount of speed you need to outrun a threat or tie with something else. Eg, Aerodactyl. Ideally you'd need just 384 speed to outrun Weavile and ohko it, but since Aero is threatened by Jolteon and other Aero, you should usually max it.

Things like Dragonite are pretty slow, and there's no point in maxing Dragonite's speed. 244 is enough to outrun Jolly Tyranitar (which can ohko you with stone edge), and that's about it.
 
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