i signed up for nupl hoping to bench and be carried more or less but i also had a bit of an interest in learning sv nu since i hadnt really played any gen 9 tiers seriously up till then - i only played 6 games due to irl stuff, but i did put in a lot of effort this season overall so id like to at least talk about the teams i used.
doing somewhat of a dive into the tier it was pretty apparent how stupid specs zoroark is (a trend you'll be seeing in this post is that i try to build around pokemon that i find to be stupidly good), and watching some replays i thought that this set + sub np toxicroak was a neat combo to break shit down. coil eel was a pretty good wincon back then, and dragon tail is fun so i slapped it on here. sandaconda is sandaconda. this appletun set is kinda wacky, most sets that arent specs are...and drifblim is the hazard control. drifblim is a bad pokemon, it was shit at this time in the meta and the only reason it isn't completely unviable now is that resisting both of sneasels stabs while also fogging can be a valuable trait sometimes. this team was kind of a mishmash of things to break, but then nothing to really clean up later on. the game just ended up being, surprise, specs zoroark boxing, and my opponent actually had momentum on his team while i did not. if zoroark did not rise i would probably have whined and moaned about how it should've been quickbanned because god damn was this thing dumb.
speaking of dumb...dudunsparce. another mon that deserved a quickban back then and kinda still does now tbh, but we'll get into that later. this team is much more cohesive but still has its flaws, mainly opposing cacturne. main prospect was to get up spikes and go to town with dudunsparce, and the other mons are just the "pieces to be filled in" - wisp hex rotom is fun and the paras dudunsparce spreads benefit it as well. the main issues with this team imo were the tera types, you'll see this notably through dudunsparce's tera. my thought process was "fairy means eel cant dtail me", and not that fairy is awful, but poison is so, so much better, even now, because you dont have to worry about getting toxic'd, flip the mu against stuff like passi, croak, and later on sneasel, and a coil or two means you don't give a shit about sandaconda anymore unless it also has coil. i ended up bullshitting lily through stupid means, because thats what this mon does. it is not good for the tier! please get rid of it!
was very excited to use sneasel, because its speed tier is a blessing, and it has a lot of neat tricks it can use (dont use scarf please). i also wanted to use pyroar because our fire resists were basically vaporeon...and vaporeon...it's a really obnoxious mon to switch into, and has the benefit of outrunning scyther, but isn't super easy to fit on teams. this also had the very very good bomb set in knock sr, which is obviously very common now, because a) knock is good, b) uturn is good, c) it lets you run coil sandaconda, and d) its great at sponging random special hits, which i definitely valued especially after getting broken apart by cacturne the week before. sd sneasel can run coverage for drifblim, and eject pack is a great set as well, but eviolite trailblaze is by far and away my favorite as setting up on sandaconda is obscene and it makes you that much harder to revenge kill. encore cacturne is probably much better than sucker, another lesson i learned from the week before.
i decided to try to work with dudunsparce, again, this time leaning in towards a better tera type and using bite so that i can fully commit to the nonsense. sub np rotom is also something that i thought was pretty cool as a breaker, and tera fairy is great on it so you can give tera dragon rush sandaconda the middle finger. speaking of which, my assumption that it would be that set in my game really fucked me up (and also being surprised that it ran max speed) - ended up fucking around more tha nnecessary considering how good rotom was in that mu, and coupled with a stone edge miss i was out of the game. not much to say about this team otherwise, taunt bird is cool.
i decided to try my hand at using a sub np rotom, Again, except this time i wanted to mess with the fridge because, like our fire resists, our ice resists are not particularly fantastic. i also wanted to switch things up a bit and use a few mons i hadnt used before, because while you only have so many options, i figured it would be a good idea to use some new mons. i also noticed i had not used a water type whatsoever up to this point, and bruxish was the only one i had liked using. the game was basically click tera psychic fangs to win because beraldo's psychic resist was chansey. its a mon you can spam stuff with if positioned correctly, and theres not many safe switches to it. the umbreon set is w/e, i wanted to be a bit of a cheeseman.
i built quite a few teams for the semifinals week because there were / are a LOT of things that are silly in this meta. of course, i ended up settling on the one that did not have an obscene mu advantage. this was the first time using an electric that wasnt rotom since the beginning of the season, as jolteon got quite a bit better now that the meta was so much faster. grimmsnarl has a lot of sets it can use but this one seemed pretty cool to me because dark + fairy is difficult to switch into, and the other "priority" options give it some nice utility. im not sure if this froslass set is the best one, but its a great pokemon because of how good spikes are and how good its stabs are. sball is here because hex needs status to ohko hoopa. braviary is the auto win button of the week here, and muk gives tspike insurance and some priority. not good priority, but it can cheese some things with poison touch, and it does hit hoopa!
conclusion for the tier is that it's not the best. as i mentioned i think there are a number of mons that i consider to be Too Much that can just completely change the flow of the game with a single opportunity. this is either due to tera, very good stats, or both...but it is also just that our options are pretty dry. sandaconda is nigh mandatory on balance, though you can get away with camerupt sometimes, and our steel types are magneton and sliggoo (admittedly have not really used the latter). it just feels like there is little defensive responses which makes building a chore sometimes, though i think the current meta is more interesting than how it was at the start of the tour. it is fun to play, but if we got some other grounds or copperajah maybe? back things would be a lot more manageable. i tried a fair bit to diverge from the norm to an extent at least, but well i used some mons / cores often because it just felt like you had to sometimes. again though there is enjoyment to be had so i think overall this season was a positive experience. thanks for reading my rants
