OU RBY Invitational II - Discussion & Team / Set Dump

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Hipmonlee

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I promised to use wild stuff for this tournament, so I figured I would share some of the ideas.

I was thinking that since I knew I was going to be playing at awkward times when I would be tired, and I wouldnt have time to practice, I would be pretty crusty. So I figured I would make up for that with crazy teams. Unfortunately building teams takes just as much time as practicing, so they were a bit underdone and some of the wilder stuff I didnt get to try out. So mostly they ended up being a little bit too sane for my liking, but that's probably good for you if you are gonna steal them.

ok
R1: https://pokepast.es/78b20dee3fee8324
and
https://pokepast.es/b2901a75f18afa19
This team is basically exploiting the current overabundance of jolteon. Anyone who relies on Jolteon as their sole zapdos check is gonna have a terrible time facing Zapdos alongside a ground type.

This build is pretty wrong though. Chansey should not be on this team, it should be a snorlax. The chansey gives up too much momentum when you havent got a lax to punish enemy chanseys. You can see the issue with that in my r1 games.

But I do want to highlight that chansey set. It will be a recurring theme here.
Chansey
Ability: Natural Cure
- Ice Beam
- Reflect
- Soft-Boiled
- Filler (usually twave)

Two big advantages to this set over the seismic toss variant. Obviously its great against rhydon. Can come in against it and have reasonable odds of beating it, as opposed to normally rhydon comes in easily against chansey. But the bigger thing is that ice lax cant stay in against you to try to freeze you. Or it can, but its a losing line for the lax. So it resolves the biggest issue with using Chansey as a lax check, so you can go back to your SPL IX lines.

The other r1 team wasnt that crazy, I had a fun counter abuse line, but it didnt really end up happening. Used a similar team in the last game r5, but again, didnt come off.

R2:
https://pokepast.es/99a78c722527fcd0
This was fun. It worked relatively well, aided by SN's starmie FPing a little too often, but hampered by paralysing his chansey with a tbolt.
The idea is you can lead chansey but have an absolutely brutal option if you face lead jynx. Lead eggy isnt really a thing at the moment, so it means youre pretty much guaranteed a favourable lead matchup. At the cost of having a really dumb Chansey set.

But imagine like, t1 its jynx, ok sleep sac starmie, back to chan, twave it, fireblast it. They have to switch now, the obvious choice is starmie. Twave it, tbolt it. They gotta switch again, so now you sing, which there is no way someone is picking that you have dropped softboiled. At this point its turn 7, you have already won the battle.

Now if you dont get that perfect matchup, its still pretty practical. Chansey still checks waters, it takes them ages to KO you. You get your sing pretty safely anyway, and Starmie is everywhere so there is a great chance of you at least getting half of the full plan. And if youre lucky you can sleep sac the chan after that. You only really need it for starmie anyway.

R2 and 4:
https://pokepast.es/70916b50f762583b and https://pokepast.es/d569a77d5459d73a
This is abusing the fact that people have been running jolteons and cloysters instead of psychic types. So you just spam them with psychic. This was a good idea, but the trend in this tournament seems to be that psychics are back in fashion.

Reflect zam is great, but so easily ppwastable. But its very hard to ppwaste it once youve already had to ppwaste an stoss zam. Two Zams isnt allowed, hence Hypno.

No lax, but you have the Chansey to shut it down pretty well. And look out for the counter reflect chan, which is pretty much guaranteed to shut lax down completely. It also is a deceptively strong sweeper. Unpar chan in an endgame can be a pain, but usually you can deal with it by just hyperbeaming with Tauros and you are favourable to win the 1v1. But not if it has reflect and counter. You dont have a great switch in against Tauros if Mie gets slept, so be careful about leaving a sleeping pokemon around too much.

Keep Eggy healthy if you can, you need it for surfmie, jolteon, alakazam and rhydon. You're pretty unlikely to face a combination of any of the last 3, but they are all pretty likely to be used with surfmie. So that's a bitch.

Against Jynx you absolutely objectively need to sleep sac Hypno, but since youre running a Hypno and its boring to use UU mons just as sleep sacs, you'll have to sleep sac Eggy and play sleeperless instead. This is not a strong position to be in, especially since, as I just mentioned, Eggy is very important to this team. "When push comes to shove you gotta do what you love, even if its not a good idea".

Seismic toss Chansey is also a dick to face btw.

Jynx is a good option over Starmie on this team too.

R4:
https://pokepast.es/f9fa76eb943999b6
Mostly just a bunch of fun sets I wanted to try. Waveless Jolteon definitely bit me in the ass, so not sure if I should recommend it. The lax is great, +6 blizzard + hyperbeam KOs Chansey, so it cant just sit on you, which Counter chan will often try to do.

R5:
https://pokepast.es/268fcbb0cebb0e7f
Rest tauros with Flash chansey to let it come in. Basically you can surprise people by taking unreasonable risks with tauros, knowing that it can heal back in the late game. The rest of the team is very defensive to support tauros when it rests. It did not come off at all, but I still think its solid. Had an alternative version with Gengar over Jolteon, which would have been utterly brutal in the game.

These teams were deliberately weird stuff, but all of them are practical. They could probably do with some tweaking, since I built most of them just before my battles.

If youre gonna try them out, please make changes. There are alternative versions of them cause when I build these teams, I usually build 2 or 3 versions. Most of them rely on surprise to some extent, so wont really work so well if your opponent has seen this thread, unless you change stuff!

Also if you have any crazy teams/sets you want to share, please do.
 

Serpi

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There's some time until shit gets serious again with SPL, so I might as well share something as well.

https://pokepast.es/730ff8a2d5e7f61b - my take on MieCloyZam

Dropping Jolteon for Zam has one big downside which is the Zapdos weakness. This mainly means that you can't Rest your Cloy as long as there might be a Zap waiting, and sometimes need to search for good Booms instead. This works out because JoltCloy rarely booms away Cloy unless their back is against the wall or Cloy's PP are spent, so an early-ish Cloy Boom will surprise most opponents. Meanwhile, Zam has many advantages over Jolt because it's simply the better mon. It's a more consistent source of progress, which is appreciated because Cloyster teams sometimes struggle to find progress after they achieve midgame balance. Also, it's a decent Chansey replacement which is great on a Sing Chansey team because that makes it easier to throw your Chansey into a freeze war or even sack it to sleep. This is also the reason why I think this team benefits a little more from a Chansey lead than CloyJolt does - in today's climate, Chansey lead raises your chances to get first sleep which opens up the possibility to sack it to sleep if it fits the situation.
My Lax is EQ Reflect with Tbolt Tauros to cover the Gengar, Counter Chansey, and Cloyster matchups, however HB Lax and EQ Tauros do a similar job while slightly improving the Zapdos matchup. The lead can be changed too, in that case you might do Blizzard > Psychic on Mie and lead that, but STAB on Mie is just very nice.

The CloyJolt comparison imposes itself, and CloyJolt is still a great consistent choice to feel out the opponent. However, vs some opponents achieving midgame balance won't win you the game by itself, and in those matches Zam will shine.

Here are all replays of me using this team during the invitational:

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen1ou-577429:
Zam comes in at a point in the game where I was gradually losing my defensive balance and procedes to actually just win the game from there.

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen1ou-581102:
This game illustrates how good it is to land Twave on Lax with a Cloyster team. It buys you time and makes it way harder for them to pressure you by repeatedly bringing in Lax, even HB Lax can't do a lot here.

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen1ou-583051:
Mie lead freezes my Chansey and I immediately lose my Cloyster as it gets crit while trying to boom the Mie for a fighting chance, the team crumbles from there. Even then, this was possible for Zam to bring back if it wakes up earlier. This type of match just happens sometimes when Chansey is your only sleeper, but to be fair this can happen with any sleeper setup. Gengar lead + Sing Chansey might be the most consistent at getting sleep off, but it's arguably a weak pair to play the rest of the game with.

When I look at the Invitational usage stats, one thing that stands out is how Cloyster has a way better win rate than Jolteon, despite them being used alongside each other a lot of the time and having similar usage:



This probably means that Jolteon teams without Cloyster have been doing worse than CloyJolt (Jolt bad), while Cloyster teams without Jolteon have been doing better than CloyJolt, which makes sense when you pit a passive team such as CloyJolt vs great players who know how to make progress vs a passive playstyle and prep for this popular team with sets such as HB Lax and Tbolt Tauros. This is why I wanted to present one of the many ways to build Cloyster without Jolteon, it's probably going to be a major trend going forward. Usually, this leads to the Cloyster being played more proactively because of the mentioned Zap-Rest conundrum, luckily Cloyster has all the tools it needs to succeed on teams that are more offensive. FOMG seems to have had some success with GarCloy builds, which are great teams as well.

Finally, all this Cloyster usage will make Hyper Beam Lax even better, a set that was very successful even in this year's SPL as pointed out by Melanie uwu with these usage stats of SPL XII:


In general, committing to use your Lax offensively in the teambuilder gets rewarded, simply because these sets (HB Reflect Lax, Physlax, even Amnesia Lax) effectively pressure the opponent whereas any passive use of Lax is prone to suddenly be on the back foot when a special attacker comes in on Rest.

Also this is a good time to finally give proper shoutouts for all the support I got from the RBY Community! For me, this all started in the March of last year when I got inspired to try out RBY because of the Lusch interview done by GGFan. Covid started happening around this time, so I had lots of time to ladder and try out a few Lusch teams I got from a german forum as well as general ideas I got from RBY Discussion threads (such as Icelax being broken lol, I spammed that set for a while) and SPL replays. I also got to play in Corona PLs, where I got destroyed by Troller and SMB, and made an early splash in RBY Cup, impressing Hipmonlee in Top 12. Lusch was big here, he gave me feedback for all RBY Cup replays which obviously was a huge help for me as a new player. Later on I had Hipmonlee and EB0LA supporting me in RBY PL and FriendOfMrGolem120 helping me out in WCoPP, so all these different perspectives from great players + my own drive to play as much RBY as possible and get better all the time were bound to quickly make me even stronger as a player.
So this is how I got bought in SPL XII by Amaranth who was looking for a 3k pick to turn them into a competitive RBY slot, which is exactly what happened. The cool thing here was that Amaranth wasn't just a great player with strong metagame opinions who analyzed the shit out of my replays, he also placed big expectations on me which raised my own standards for myself as well, and it changed my perspective! Even today, I sometimes turn on Amaranth mode after a tough set and go through the replays, being very critical of potential mistakes, chosen lines and teams that could've been more solid. Our season could've been different if I pulled out the wins vs Mako and Troller and SPL playoffs would've been a cool experience but in the end I have to be happy with my 5-4 run.
So yeah, huge thanks to all the ppl mentioned here for all the support I got from you guys. :)
Also shoutouts to all the grinders of small RBY tours who I matched up vs again and again. chuva de perereca spies Melanie uwu emma Quarante8 Oiseau Bleu Frrf come to mind. We had some great sets and I predict some of these tour grinders to rise to the top of RBY eventually if they try. Shoutouts in general to the RBY Community for being rlly nice. This includes scheduling, sharing stuff in discussions, supporting each other, battle chat behaviour, maturity in general... It's also cool to just talk about RBY in DMs with people like eden and Thepatatedouce, I'm obsessed so I could do this all day lol.
Lastly, big thanks to friends from the discord who cheer me on and are interested about my matches even though they had nothing to do with RBY initially. Lord_Enz Gefährlicher Random MAX UND MAX RaiZen1704 LNumbers
This applies to the german-speaking mons community as well, thx for cheering me on!! Especially Jaajgko pasy_g MichaelderBeste2 erz Fantos13 CMx ukaaa QWILY come to mind.

Shoutouts to Roccstar for being a legend.
 
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Amaranth

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Zam+Cloy had 68% winrate across 25 games as a core (17 wins / 8 losses), one of the most notable stats from this Invitational for sure. Backing Serpi's post wholeheartedly, this is strong and people need to respect it more (case in point: why is zapdos 11th in usage? you guys are silly)
 
Can't say I really used anything too awesome but there are some things I used this tour that I thought were cool.

R1 wasn't anything too crazy, but back in SPL Slowbro made a reappearance and from what I saw after returning to playing, he was still pretty popular so I decided to give it a try. I avoided Slowbro for a long time cause I just wasn't sure how to pull it off. In SPL it had 65% win rate across 20 games, but in Invitational it fell off to 41% win rate in 32 games. Not sure whether that's just due to overuse or people coming more prepared for it, or just the fact that Slowbro's usually relying on not getting crit, but I think some people had the same idea as me and have started playing it more than before SPL.

https://pokepast.es/e84f14fb6cdf667a
This was the team I used g2 vs. Eden. Honestly can't say I've been rocking with Reflect Chans as of late so not sure it's the best pick here but that's what I brought.
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen1ou-1397327029-vwtk7qu2smc8wpatc5ch4ghvbw9fs4apw
The bro didn't really do anything besides not get itself frozen to clutch the end game, but I still think Slowbro's impact vs. teams that lack counter measures like Bolt Mie/Chansey or an electric, but even vs. an electric Slowbro can find its way to a victory.

R2 I brought some more eccentric teams, although not as crazy as some of the stuff Lusch has brought to RBY PL or what Hip used. Sometime between R1 and R2 Serpi brought something up about CloyDon and I thought the team seemed cool so I put something together for my match with Hip.

https://pokepast.es/184810579a05a61e
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen1ou-574809
This team might want to lead Chansey but that would preferably utilize a sequence like lead Chansey -> sing the Mie -> sack Chansey to sleep, then have my Starmie in the back for opposing Cloy. However, Hip lead with his own Chansey AND had Tbolt on it so that probably wouldn't have been favorable in this scenario. Not really sure I piloted this team well at all but I like the concept. It's probably quite hard to deal with back waters like the Mie in the game, or a Slowbro depending on the game state. Lapras actually had >50% winrate in 12 games this tour and I could see that giving this team a hard time as well.

https://pokepast.es/df8ba509655c2441
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen1ou-574825
G2 was just a standard Mie Zam team but I had double counter and stomp on my Tauros. I was a little too hopeful of just getting some easy counter kills and flinching things but Hip brought out the PsySpam so Counter wasn't too great here.

R3 I brought an absolute monstrosity. I think surprise factor is an underrated tool, especially for mons like Lax with a versatile move pool. In this case though, I had the surprise on my Starmie's garbage set.

https://pokepast.es/58ebd2cff051a94e
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen1ou-575700
This team should never be loaded up again, having a single T Waver, but I really, really wanted to use Hyper Beam Starmie. Honestly I was having a hard time figuring out the best set combination for Lax & Chansey to support my Starmie so there's probably something better than AmnesiaFlect Lax. My Starmie got super lucky with all the Psydrops and crits in the end game, and even in the end I probably lost if Mana had simply spammed Body Slam with Tauros since I had no T Wave on my team, so the only thing going in my favor was a lack of information, but, I did get a kill with Hyper Beam Starmie and that's what counts, right?

R4 wasn't special at all really.

R5 though has my proudest moment.

https://pokepast.es/75af1966c485f9cb
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen1ou-578680
This is actually the second time I've used Egg without Sleep Powder, and both times I used it was because I had Gar + Sing Chansey so I was using Egg purely as offensive utility. It goes back to what I said about surprise factor and while Egg is less versatile than Lax, I really think Egg is great and its potential utility can turn games around.

The idea for double normal egg is exactly what it seems like. Double high rolls can actually kill Zam from full, so if Zam's even chipped by a little % the odds to kill are pretty good. Calcs are comparable for Jynx, but Chansey needs more chip. I felt fine fishing vs FOMG's Chansey because I could get it in on sleeping Cloy, and since Chansey was chipped a little I just needed 1 para in however many cycles as long as I could keep the pressure up. Felt really great to kill the Chansey exactly how I intended to!


Overall the tour was fun and it was good to play again after a short hiatus. I'd agree with how Cloy is showing to be amazing, whether it's Cloy + X or on it's lonesome, and Gar's usage from SPL XI -> XII went up by 7, and here it was comparable to Zapdos in usage. Personally I think Lax is the best normal, so Cloy and Gar rising in popularity is obviously making it harder for him to have the same impact. Same goes for Tauros, with TBolt being more popular than before, pairing Cloy and Gar together helps punish.



1636134649171.png
 

Melbelle

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...This probably means that Jolteon teams without Cloyster have been doing worse than CloyJolt (Jolt bad), while Cloyster teams without Jolteon have been doing better than CloyJolt...
The full team of Mie/Cloy/Jolt/Big3 was actually at a 36.36% winrate in 22 uses, 40.7% of Jolteon's total use and actually a lower winrate than Jolteon's overall 38.89%. The team of Alakzam/Jolt/Cloy/Big3 however is at 100% winrate in 5 uses. This is probably variance with a low sample size. The combo of Starmie / Jolteon is at a 31.82% in 44 uses and Jolteon / Cloyster still remains above 50% despite the low joltcloy winrate with a 51.61% in 31 uses. Maybe the secret is... don't pair Jolteon with Starmie? Jynx/Mie/Jolt/Big3 was also at a 11.11% winrate in 9 games.
 
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