FBK INTERVIEWS
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Xavgb
Favorite Pokémon: Bonsly
Most used Pokémon: Zapdos-Galar
Most known for: (is also one of the best players on this site and has won multiple trophies, most recently olt XI) (went 8-2 in scl IV playing RU)
Now that I had acquired the key to the feliburn chronicles, all i needed to do was to locate the vault in which they were stored. In order to do that i would need to interrogate the X.A.V.G.B supercomputer, which was known to be at the bottom of suetzned's abandoned hideout. After a gruelling trek full of cobwebs, spiders and booby traps, I finally managed to locate the hidden chamber that contained the X.A.V.G.B. I fired up the computer's monitor, and typed in my request.
vv
what?
#'#
these outputs made no sense. I tried once more.
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yet again, complete gibberish. Undeterred however, I kept trying to get any sort of answer that made sense.
];' 4e-0]
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Finally, on the 11th attempt-
they should give regular samurott ceaseless edge
Somehow, the computer was talking sense. Not wanting to waste my opportunity, i quickly began to probe for answers.....
Hi, how're you doing?
Pretty good, you?
I'm doing well too, thanks for asking. You've been on this site for a long time but for those who dont know, would you mind introducing yourself?
Yea no problem, my smogon name is xavgb but I often go by the name stresh in most of the community. I'm 24 and live in London right now, and after playing a bunch of tiers over the years I settled in the RU slot for the Terrors in SCL
So how did you get into smogon and pokemon in general?
My family was a big pokemon family so my older brother and sister already played the games. My sister lent me her copy of Pokemon Ruby when I was about 7 and I quickly became a fan, although I was pretty dumb and got stuck early because I never read any dialogue. A couple years later my parents got me Pokemon Diamond as a gift and I played it everywhere I could, and within a year I was obsessed to the point I was looking up mechanics on Bulbapedia to understand the game better. When I was 13 I went off to boarding school and was a bit homesick at first, so I started playing more pokemon again for comfort and that was when I found aim's channel and learned that there was a whole free pokemon simulator just sitting right there (which was an insane concept to me at the time as I'd grown to hate grinding)My smogon joindate is 2014, but that was mostly me looking at one news message about olt and signing up to join the tour. My real smogon career starts in late 2017/early 2018 when I was high on the Mix and Mega ladder and another ladderer introduced me to the Other Metagames Discord. I became a regular OM community member after that, eventually becoming the best OM player ever (I don't think this is controversial) at which point I turned my focus to the main tiers, playing PU in SCL 1 and then OU in most subsequent tours, which brings us to my most recent escapades in RU.
That's pretty cool (i hella get you about the grinding lol) and obvious olt foreshadowing aside, it's pretty interesting that you first got into competitive mons via OMs. Do you think the early OM exposure influenced your building and playing style?
Yes and no. It's definitely true that building OMs forces you to think creatively in a lot of situations, but really I think the main effect is that you end up with a bunch of different metas that amplify one aspect of the game over another which helps to understand how things work more clearly. The OM that I learned the most from is probably Balanced Hackmons, as the sheer amount of options (basically any move and ability on any pokemon you want) forced me to narrow down the most efficient ways to build offensive cores and make progress in-game in order to have the best chances at winning. I'd say that the most constant through-line that explains my success across tiers is the ability to take a metagame that has lots of ways to make progress and rule out options until I'm left with a very efficient team, which in turn gives me space to handle the metagame threats better. In some cases though, you do need to be careful when making the transition from OMs to main tiers. When I first picked up PU in SCL 1, I was somewhat prone to "wish-fulfillment" building where I'd try to fit every possible offensive concept into my builds, sometimes at the expense of using the actual good mons in the tier, and every so often this would backfire on me, like the time I brought Duosion against Raiza and got 6-0ed. That being said, the innovations I made in that tier at the time were still massively valuable and I did end 4-2 in PU for that SCL, but pretty much all of my games were 6-0s in either direction...
ic. It seems like the biggest boon to playing non-standard formats is that you develop the ability to think outside of common metagame cores and structures, which like you said can prove very valuable. Speaking of scl, how did you feel about the way the RU metagame developed in this edition of the tournament?
I personally had a lot of fun with the tier throughout, although I maintain that it is one of the weirdest tiers I've ever played (which is saying a lot because I've played a huge amount of tiers). For the most part the metagame felt like a battle between the earlier concept I mentioned of "wish-fulfillment" and general viability which has more to do with how well-rounded a pokemon is between stats/typing etc. Probably the most obvious example of this is found with the Spikers, where each Spike user comes with its flaws and difficulties to navigate in the builder, but the concept of Spikes itself is insanely strong within the tier. I spent most of my time just building around certain concepts repeatedly until I figured out new ways to approach defensive cores, and then I'd test with umbry and see whether those defensive cores could handle the fast mons and sweepers in practice. I'm definitely glad that I got the opportunity to play RU in SCL because I think I managed to get a lot further in building with a couple of months to just focus on the tier alone.
As for general thoughts on the metagame at this point, I think that offense is king right now. RU has had pretty regular problems stopping sweeping threats due to the deceptive lack of non-passive defensive blanket checks, as well as a lack of good offensive pokemon that can threaten to clean a lategame situation vs offense. The core that I like the most for Offense is Scarf Zap-G + Mimikyu + Armarouge. As long as one of the remaining three mons is strong into balance teams I think this is the best way to handle all matchups, as I think the biggest priority with offense is to not lose to other offense, and these 3 mons offer a lot in practicality with their ability to blanket check everything and still make their own progress.
"Offense is king" does seem like the MO for gen 9 so far, especially with all new busted mons we've got. I do want to get your insight on hazard removal options for this tier because most of the community feels like the options are limited and your take would obviously be very valuable.
One of the main things I believe across all of Gen 9, and also Gen 8 to an extent is that no hazard removal option is good enough to justify the assumption that you'll always be able to clear hazards, and as such you should always have some form of offensive and defensive utility in your team that can still function properly even if hazards go up. In the case of Gen 9 RU, I take this concept a bit further which usually leads to me rejecting hazard removal altogether (I only loaded Defog twice in my 10 SCL games, and I didn't load a single Cyclizar), in favour of having mons with better defensive/offensive utility. In both cases that I did load Defog, I used it because I had specific bulky mons that I wanted to enable without completely losing to Spikes (Hippowdon, Cloak Slowbro, Lefties Vaporeon), but outside of this use case I'd generally say you're better off going with some Spikes route and having certain progress makers/defensive pieces protected by Heavy-Duty Boots. Another take that I have in general is that all of our Defog options would much rather use that slot for something else on the average team. Noivern wants Psynoise + Super Fang, Galarian Weezing wants Toxic + Wisp or even Tspikes in some rare cases, Talonflame likes U-turn + Wisp esp with Spikes support, even Conk would like to run Flame Orb or Bulk Up although I don't think that mon is majorly relevant.
While we're on the topic of gen 9, i'd also like to ask your opinions of tera and how it impacts building in comparision to older gens.
I've been one of the most prominent "Tera haters" since December 2022 ish, but unlike many of the people who dislike the mechanic, I don't think it completely ruins the game. The evaluation that I came to early in the generation was that Tera as a mechanic hurts players' ability to predict their opponent on certain turns and in certain mid-game sequences. My understanding is that the natural competitive response to losing control over mid-game sequences is to try and regain that control in the builder, which encourages good players to focus more on builder concepts that are so strong that any mid-game tera usage isn't enough to prevent the team's plan from being executed. I generally believe that this is a bad incentive as it's essentially encouraging good players to focus less on making good plays throughout the game, which is why I generally felt the mechanic has been a net negative (even if it's only a small negative) for the generation. That being said, one of the things the mechanic does have going for it is that some players still really struggle to navigate how to build and play in a metagame that has Tera, so some of the skill gap between players can return in the form of a knowledge gap, which imo is why the generation has been able to maintain a cohort of high-performing players who understand the mechanic better than the rest of the playerbase. All in all, even if it's not competitively optimal, I can appreciate the quirks of the generation which provide a lot of interesting things to talk about. As an aside, I think it's also worth mentioning that my experience with Tera as a mechanic has been very different when I'm playing OU compared to when I play lower tiers, perhaps due to the massive amounts of power creep that are found in other aspects of Gen 9.
That is interesting. I've always heard that sv favours the grinders so it makes sense that the knowledge gap is what's separating the best from the rest. coming back to you though, we saw that pokeaim's videos were what got you into ps! in the first place. Who else would you consider to be the guys that helped you pick up and get better at the game? Also, this OU/lower tiers dichotomy is intriguing. can you elaborate on the differences you've found between the metagames?
My mons career has been through a lot of phases by now, so I'll try and go through the biggest influences from each. I played OMs during the tail end of what I consider to be a "golden generation" of OM players, so I'd often pick up on things that they did in test games we played together and apply them to my own games. A lot of this generation of OM players have some officials experience too, shiloh/aesf/andyboy/jrdn/racool were some of the players I tested with the most. I also used to hang around various other communities which aren't part of the OM section but also aren't official tiers, in particular Jordy (ex-CAP and OU mod) taught me a lot of the basics about how to build teams, and I used to play an insane amount of games against him. For official tiers the list is shorter since I was already coming off a big run in OMs by the time I started playing officials, but I always looked up to Felix (Gefahrlicher Random) and Bea as the two clear best SwSh OU players when I started playing the generation.
OU in general tends to receive the pokemon that have the smallest pool of "natural answers", so you have to deal with things like Gliscor which you can't really expect to handle in the builder without direct Gliscor checks, since you can't status it or just throw a random wall at it. The OU meta essentially functions off of some blanket checks and then some specific checks to the threats that cannot be handled by blanket checks, so Tera can end up being pretty important to increase the amount of things that your blanket checks can provide a temporary stop against. OU also has to deal with a league of Booster Energy sweepers, among other types of sweepers that have a lot of versatility in their moveset, which makes it really hard to build sometimes. I try to build my OU teams to a standard where if I'm calling something a "switchin" to a Booster threat like Iron Valiant, that means I can make a hard switch to my counter and at least survive the 1v1 vs any set, assuming neither party Teras. That way, if the threat does decide to Tera past me, I can revenge kill it with my own Tera blanket check and keep things relatively even. With the best sweepers of the gen this can be very difficult though, like with the Valiant example a lot of people would have treated Volcarona as a Valiant switchin under this framework, but most Volcarona sets lose to SD Knock Off by living one hit from the Volc, or two CMs into two Psyshocks, or sometimes even SD Liquidation for a clean OHKO. Lower tiers usually don't have Tera threats to this level, although the lack of blanket checks can lead to some really weird threats being really annoying (like DD Salamence). Back when I started playing RU during RUPL this year, I noticed that in a lot of Slowbro balance games there wasn't really a high impact Tera turn for either player, which I thought was interesting and definitely changed my perspective on the mechanic a little bit.
That makes sense, so tera tends to force more trades in a higher power metagame like OU as compared to a lower tier, where its effect is more drawn out. While we're on this topic of gamestates and trades and such, is there a particular replay of one of your games that you find interesting and would like to share with us?
Although this featured one of the two teams I didn't build myself, I had a lot of fun in my game vs robjr this SCL
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen9ru-798471?p2
The double para on Empoleon set my early momentum back a lot and it was an interesting challenge to figure out how to get back into the game from there. I managed to trick him on Turn 11 to get the big Knock Off onto Thundurus, and then I had to go for the Spikes into Tera Ghost Gligar route, and from there I basically need to find a way to carry my momentum through to the end of the game since Cyclizar getting off hazards would be really bad for me at that point. On turn 22 I find the crucial path of bringing Gardevoir in on Thundurus to trace its Prankster ability, allowing me to get off Scarf Trick before Thunder Wave, and then two turns later I manage to get a Prankster Healing Wish to block Cyclizar's Rapid Spin so that Feraligatr + the stored Hwish for Zap can close out the endgame.
Oh yeah this was hype, feraligatr crunch on the tera ghost was great viewing. I've just got a few more questions for you now,first off who among the newer ru players do you see making a name for themselves in the future?
If Lime counts as an answer then I'd definitely say him, I think he's a solid player and I've liked his team picks the most out of the other SCL players. I also looked into some of Toinha's replays while scouting for SCL talent and I thought he had potential, although I already had myself in RU and umbry as support for the tier so we weren't able to pick him up. (also jui 1 canard made a lot of progress in a short amount of time, I wouldn't be surprised if he gets very good at some point in the future)
And what direction do you think gen 9 RU is going to take?
In terms of tiering?
More so metagame development, what archetypes and mons do you think will pop off.
It's always hard to say with these things but I think SCL has demonstrated a shift away from the bulkier Regen balances with Slowbro/Hippowdon/Cyclizar now being disliked by a few of the top builders. The biggest thing I've noticed that gets opened up by this is Scarf Gzap, it's obviously not a new set but I feel like it's an incredibly reliable mon that can even break more modern teams down, as well as generally revenge killing a lot of annoying newer threats like Gyarados. I'd consider Gzap to be a serious contender for best mon in the meta right now, it fits on all the good styles. In terms of archetypes, as I've mentioned a few times I think Spikes is incredibly strong and I hope more people start to recognize that going forward, in particular the combination of Rocks + Spikes + RestTalk Wo-Chien or RestTalk AloMuk has been pretty easy to win with for a while, since it really messes up the old-school Slowbro balances and can still get wins against offense with the right picks. As for pokemon, I think we're approaching the point where Gyarados has to be considered as one of the main sweeping threats in this metagame, and Mimikyu has been disrespected a lot but I consider it a key piece in offense and HO right now. I also had a lot of fun using more offensive Cresselia spreads with Tera Fairy and Psyshock > Stored Power, I think the extra speed helps it become a really dangerous wincon in many situations, while maintaining decent defensive utility.
Death of slowbro balance is real lmfaoo (cress is very interesting i'll have to try it out)ok my final question to you is thiswhat's the history with xavgb and stresh?
So xavgb is an internet handle i've used for a long time, it's basically just my name (Xavier) + my country (Great Britain)Stresh comes from an old showdown alt I made when I was like 14 (Fresh Start -> Stresh Fart). When I first got voice in the Other Metagames Room I decided to remove the Fart, and the Stresh name just kinda stuck from there.
Stresh fart gaming yoooo
anyhow thanks a ton for your time stresh, it was a pleasure to interview you
Thanks a lot, sorry if the answers were a bit long I do like to ramble haha
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Feel free to ask
xavgb any questions you want!
If you have any feedback or suggestions, kindly DM me!
(is also one of the best players on this site and has won multiple trophies, most recently olt XI) (went 8-2 in scl IV playing RU)