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Welcome to the Smogon Champions League V Discussion Thread -- Ubers edition! This thread will be used to discuss Ubers in SCL V related topics, whether it’s about the players, general metagame trends, matches, predictions and so on. Teams, Replays, and Usage Stats can be found here(SOON).
Well, it is time of the year, and I’m surprised somebody made a whole thread for just a single tier with a single slot in SCL, but more Ubers content? Hell yeah.
Rooting hard for Emoxu9 the goat, who knows what new discoveries will he make? Maybe we will see another set that is as funny as IDCM Arceus / NDM or substeel koraidon…
Anyways off to meta predictions, I predict that NDM will rise once more with the high usage of eternatus and substeel koraidon, though there are other mons that could also deal with the aforementioned threats well, I just feel like that many new techs are just coming from dusk mane, even seen dd Tera blast fire and cm sunsteel for some reason on the ladder. (us Chinese players are the greatest raghhhhh)
ok by popular demand im here to give my subjective take on the players
1. Fc - is the rare combo of very solid piloting with very solid team building, i dont think anyone comes close to him in this pool rn, but its sv ubers so i wouldnt be surprised if he goes 0-8 (im praying he does
2. Icemaster - Ice always locks in during scl, and fsr he just has some innate sense of being ahead of the trends as far as teams go. Solid piloting as well, he has plot armor too
3. Truenora - very very underrated player. probably one of the best builders, who pilots as well as anyone, but he doesnt have that much experience in officials i think. regardless tho he is top quality
4. emoxu9 - very inform up and coming ubers player, im looking forward to how they do.
5. Entro - he would be higher on the list if he wasnt so busy living life away from mons, idk how much effort he will put in, or if he will keep up with the trends and etc. regardless tho top quality player still, the margins are small in this list
6. Kate - kate is a pretty mediocre player but she will grind a team with like 40 test games to learn all the optimal lines, plus she been playing sv uber for years now so she will probably be okay with no tests too, maybe. plus i think they are easily top 3 builders in the meta when she locks in
7. exiline - past experience, nice piloter, kind of a shit builder but can do well if he steals from others
8. Frito - i view frito similar to kate but a worse builder (maybe, im not actually sure about this). regardless tho they had a nice wcop so the momentum is there
9. Scottie - ngl idk why they get drafted for ubers every year, especially when they are 10k, but they had a nice wcop i think so maybe they can do good this time. i dont have high hopes but they are a solid player and its sv ubers so anything can happen
10. Taka - idk i think there were like 10 other better options for a uber starter, i didnt really understand this. but taka is not a bad player, they could surprise me but im not hopeful
ok by popular demand im here to give my subjective take on the players
1. Fc - is the rare combo of very solid piloting with very solid team building, i dont think anyone comes close to him in this pool rn, but its sv ubers so i wouldnt be surprised if he goes 0-8 (im praying he does
2. Icemaster - Ice always locks in during scl, and fsr he just has some innate sense of being ahead of the trends as far as teams go. Solid piloting as well, he has plot armor too
3. Truenora - very very underrated player. probably one of the best builders, who pilots as well as anyone, but he doesnt have that much experience in officials i think. regardless tho he is top quality
4. emoxu9 - very inform up and coming ubers player, im looking forward to how they do.
5. Entro - he would be higher on the list if he wasnt so busy living life away from mons, idk how much effort he will put in, or if he will keep up with the trends and etc. regardless tho top quality player still, the margins are small in this list
6. Kate - kate is a pretty mediocre player but she will grind a team with like 40 test games to learn all the optimal lines, plus she been playing sv uber for years now so she will probably be okay with no tests too, maybe. plus i think they are easily top 3 builders in the meta when she locks in
7. exiline - past experience, nice piloter, kind of a shit builder but can do well if he steals from others
8. Frito - i view frito similar to kate but a worse builder (maybe, im not actually sure about this). regardless tho they had a nice wcop so the momentum is there
9. Scottie - ngl idk why they get drafted for ubers every year, especially when they are 10k, but they had a nice wcop i think so maybe they can do good this time. i dont have high hopes but they are a solid player and its sv ubers so anything can happen
10. Taka - idk i think there were like 10 other better options for a uber starter, i didnt really understand this. but taka is not a bad player, they could surprise me but im not hopeful
Tried to finish this up before the first week 2 game started, enjoy.
Week 1 Recap
Back like I never left covering SCL like I did last year but with a lot less senseless writing and focusing on the more impactful parts of the game.
A very predictable structure from Scottie vs a strong offensive team from emoxu. Emoxu came into the game playing aggressive rather early as he meteor beamed into activating tera turn 2 with his etern, rewarding him, getting rid of a defensive anchor in fairyceus very quickly. The etern is phased out by the ho-oh and in comes don as Scottie switches into glisc scared of the bird being stoned to death, but emoxu is quick on his feet, predicts the switch and clicks SD, heatcrashing the glisc to oblivion. Scottie brings in his ditto to counter the opposing don as emoxu was well prepared and brought out his dusk-mane, revealing air balloon, locking scottie into eq and safely being allowed to DD and clearing out the rest of the team. This is the definition of good prep, Scottie is renown for using balances/bo and doesn't shy away from that at all, but there's only so much those structures can do before you run into players who can exploit your tendencies. I do feel Scottie can bounce back in future weeks but he has to build out of his comfort zone, otherwise, it's not looking too good.
A game of misfortune from the eyes of a blind man. The beginning ensues with cm wars which leads to the likely outcome, an eventual crit, and for fc, this happened sooner than expected, and it wasn't in his favor. It was unlucky to happen, but bound to, which only lead to the waterceus dying the next turn anyway. As the game goes on, Fc finally get's some justice as a burn on the dusk-mane comes from the eterns flamethrower, getting him back in the game. Fade makes a bold move on the Ho-Oh recover and clicks SD into getting 5 scale shots with LO korai, securing him the game. Circling back to the first sentence, the 5 scales didn't matter, it just won jon the game faster, how you ask? That's not up to me to reveal.
Two standard looking six from both sides. Nora gains some early momentum by twaving the korai early in exchange for ogre getting hit with a Ip Man special. Nora get's a spike up with don down the road as groundceus comes in to judgment the don to low hp as it goes for wisp. Nora brings in fairyceus to cm as the groundceus can not win that 1v1 forcing exiline to go into ho-oh and phase it out. Exiline eventually brings in his ndm to dd as nora goes into his gambit, revealing balloon, something the ndm can not touch, forcing it out. 44 turns of slow burn ensues as exiline slowly loses his mons to damage + 2 stacks of spikes, dropping the korai with precipice. He decides to go into his ogre as nora sacs his fairyceus to beam, bringing in his own ogre clicking twave with no issue as etern comes in. The etern gets para'd and dies to beam. Nora bring's out his korai and clicks sd, wildcharging the ho-oh, switching out on the incoming scarf ogre into don and dodges origin pulse, doubling back into korai and clicking CC on the ogre, winning the game. It seems Fc didn't update the samples in time and cost Exiline a victory.
Mag + hatt trick room from Frito and a dual primal balance from Kate. Kate leads with don right away to get hazards up as Frito leads with dawn-wings and switches into hatt to counter that. Kate predicts the hatt switch and gets a crit with eq on the hatt, forcing frito to go into waterceus as that is their only "ground resist" or safe option to tank eq. She switches into hatt and dodges eq after setting up TR with waterceus. Kate goes for spikes twice on the hatt in an attempt to predict that Frito would switch but to no avail, she doesn't and clicks psynoise to chip down one of the many threats to her team. Kate goes into ogre and gets a para via thunder on the waterceus, paralyzing it same turn, rendering it useless. Frito goes into mag to set up tr and misty explosions to get some chip on the ogre as Kate expects it and switches into don for the sac. At this point, NDW + band caly is not enough to come back and win so Kate solidified the win as nothing can set up TR.
Using TR is like shooting dice, you do a come out roll, hope for the 7 or 11 but you actually throw a 2, 3, or 12 and you end up losing it all. TR is very make or break; high risk, low reward but when it gets the right matchup, it's beautiful, the odds of that is 5%. This is the second person I've seen use TR vs Kate and lost, I don't know what specifics brings people to use TR vs her but it isn't working, for the foreseeable future, pls leave it alone vs Kate.
Two SCL returners face off using two formidable offenses. Entro with a similar six that I made for jon last SCL against surprisingly, the same opponent, difference is, WE LOST. Our game last year had some mid-game mistakes but that's what happens, it's easier to spectate and act like you're in that position than actually being there and playing the game. Anyway, the game starts off with the two obvious leads in glimm and deo-s and this specific exchange depends solely on what moves the deo-s is running, fortunately entro had t-wave and could bank on paralyzing the glimm while setting up spikes and going into zac-c and spinblocking. Entro subs up on glimm switch clicking sd putting the ndm in range of a 2hko from behemoth. NDM's eq put's zac in range to be killed by ekiller forcing entro to sac the deo-s, going into korai and clicking scale for free as ice sacs ndm, bringing ekiller back in to revenge kill the korai. A repeat of the sequence occurs but this time, zac-c is the sac over deo-s and lunala is the sac over ndm, but a slight change occurs, korai stays in and dies to espeed, allowing entro to agility with his lunala, trade with the korai since it has to blitz and he wins the game with dd groundceus.
1. I
2. Think
3. Any
4. One
5. Of
6. Them
7. Can
8. Go
9. Positive
10. jon, jonfilch, fade, fade.exe, i<3catgirls, fade six eyes, deathnyann
hi! here's the video I made for this. i kinda ramble on a bit and my mic cuts out here and there but hope its watchable:
this is the text version of scl team dump for anyone who wants to just go through, but expect a bunch of blobs of paragraphs. i was in charge of the ubers slot for the studio gibles during this scl, and i played weeks 5 through semis while fade played weeks 1 through 4. overall we went a combined 8-2, I went 5-1 and fade went 3-1. here i'm aiming to just go over my prep process / the teams i made including sets/evs / and the games that i played.
first and foremost i want to thank RichardMillePlain, Skyiew, Hoennseptile,Lana, Jojen for supporting me all tour. I know I pestered you all asking for like 500 games but without your help I wouldn't have been able to get this record.
in general i think this tier is heavily offensive and prep-oriented, a lot of the teams you see me talk about are built to take advantage of my opponents tendencies with some counterplay for other structures. obviously you're going to see koraidon on everything. i didn't use stall or trick room this tour so there was no reason to not use it since its the best glue in the tier.
guess we can start this off yea. week 1 i was against fc. tbh since it was the first week, i wasn't planning to be as prep heavy, and fc is generally a pretty versatile player. i think i wanted to generally cover BO / balance / and kingambit. i was expecting some sort of Ho-Oh. in general i think a few different structures, but since both fade and i prefer offense I ended up settling on this HO-esque structure with 5 setup mons and landorus. so most of these sets are pretty normal i'd say, i had fast taunt fairy to annoy his slower arceus formes / lunala, fire kingambit ev'd to eat 2 defensive arc judges from full (though not super useful if they ended up rocking), lo fire koraidon to break standard balances. the main twist of this team is dd brick break ndm to lure gambit (with colbur to pair well with lunala and help vs gambit / crunch zacian in a pinch). then we have cm meteor beam lunala. so generally on an HO structure u guess it'd be beam lunala and be hesitant to go ho-oh directly on it. clicking calm mind is kind of a green flag for your opponent to go hard ho oh, which lets lunala act as a nice lure. you still get some immediate power and it helps a bit vs cm arcs. tera ghost can also bruteforce a lotta shit, and focus felt necessary due to his gambit / ting usage.
as i said before, i won't be discussing the games that i didn't play very heavily, but we did get fortunate this game, the lure did not hit as we did not run into a Ho-Oh, and lunala crit through a calm mind waterceus (though i felt like clicking cm was a sign that I could be psyshock). i'd say for this game, the matchup was likely in fc's favor, but it was for sure winnable on our end too with some diff lines / diff variance of luck.
so i think for truenora our prep process was a bit similar. in general tbh i think i underrate ting-lu, mon is a fucking pain for a lot of different teams, especially my style of team (Which is heavily boots-less + includes ghosts and non-low kick koraidon). but i was generally thikning we'd expect some sort of waterceus type team. i kind of mass built for this week honestly and just had fade pick a team that had good vibes. think we initially settled down to either some sort of fat spikes shit like groudon ho oh kyogre eternatus or a few offenses with cm arceus-electric and zacian. think at some point during the teams process, the lack of a real fighting resist / overreliance on landorus on some of these teams made me more interesting in swapping out arc electric for ghostceus. so similar to before, i kind of cheated defensive counterplay on this bulky offense team with some general techs and teras that would help us matchup into the offenses i expected from nora. bulkless ogre is a little funny but with eternatus + steel korai + taunt ghost, our matchup into other ogres felt fine. (though i think this was a mistake? because originally i had turbo ogre on this because we had arcelectric legit until last minute, maybe 10 minutes before game). i had ghostceus just ev'd to outspeed modest arcs, rest in bulk. taunt gives us an additional out vs some cheese like calyrex / tr ndm / gambit that can get out of hand vs this. steel zacian and steel koraidon formed an offensive core that felt decent defensively into most cheese + acted as pseudo speed control by having defensive teras that beat a lot of setup. red card on etern is the real weird set here, its really just there for groundceus, which i found ice beam groundceus to be quite annoying to play vs. especially since i'm known for loading lando, i thought having some nice sequence vs setup could be cool, and i trusted fade to do shit like go etern on groundceus ice beam, zacian cc, or koraidon flare blitz to give us a bunch of momentum in the offense mirror. we loaded into this weird ass ting-lu terapagos wisp elecceus team. the matchup was pretty dire tbh, we just got called out hard and didn't have a ton of luck on our side either. i like this team but out of the teams we've used this tour, this is for sure the weakest. i don't think the speed control is quite that nice, the defensive tools are hit or miss vs certain structures, and i feel like these techs are definitely not as reusable as others. this was one of our two losses, lost mostly on prep/matchup.
so moving onto week 3. IMO i had a better idea of how to prep for frito than i did for nora or fc. obviously i wanted to offense, because its fucking broken. but after seeing her wcop teams, some of her structures in upl, i noticed some commonalities, like a lack of defensive eterns, reliance on running offenses that pivoted around resists for koraidon rather than hard stops with mons like fairyceus + fat ogre. my main two thoughts here were to bring a team with either a fast enough pace to ignore hazards and break first, or mono boots and play the groudon / ting lu boots koraidon line. i'm an offense junkie, so the two mons that popped up in mind were generally banded koraidon and scarf ogre. scarf ogre is honestly kind of a shitter, but it has its matchups especially into people who dont load a ton of bulky kyogre or eternatus. band koraidon bruteforces through a lot of tough matchups with strong aura terafighting close combat. generally though, frito uses a lot of ghost types, albeit frail ones. something i figured out during testing was that banded crunch had good odds to oneshot lunala, so vs lead lunalas or even during a game when lunala hadnt broken shadow shield, you could leverage koraidon to immediately eliminate it. huge calc and this made band koraidon actually viable into her loads. generally with mons like band korai and scarf ogre you need a lot of pivoting. after miraidon got banned, there really only are a handful of pivots: koraidon, lando-t, gliscor, and pecharunt. pecha is a mon that i picked up from seeing frito and kate use it in previous tours, and it patched the ekiller matchup while giving me an out into tspikes that wasnt so reliant on tera. i rounded this team out with my favorite defensive mons: fairyceus and lando-t to form the amazing kyogre lando fairy core (which i have been using for like 3 years now cuz its so good into anything not lo eternatus). fat cm roar fairyceus was a nice wincon that i throw on these teams to help cheat some setup matchups since arceus has the bulk to eat legitimately anything. honestly i dont remember what exactly the bulk on eternatus does, i could not tell you. but it was faster than modest arceus at least! the teras are all pretty standard here, but since etern has a lot of mixed bulk i went with fire as a decent neutral tera vs korai / zacian / ndm / calyrex. honestly i can probably just say that band koraidon had never had such a fire matchup. banded close combat is known for 2 shotting ho oh and it did exactly that this game and we did not have to stress too much vs this balance structure.
OK its going to be kind of hard for me to describe this weeks prep process. when i prep i kinda just ramble to myself for like hours and then schizo build like 15 teams and test them. i think the main idea we had was exploiting the lack of ghost resists. his teams were reliant on tera dark ho-oh mainly to deal with them, so i figured some sort of offensive ghostceus or boosted lunala would blow through his shit. since we had 100% lando usage at this point, i was pretty set on fully avoiding that mon this week, which essentially means i'd be loading ho-oh (another insanely good mon though so not like im rly losing anything). ho-oh is really nice to have a team but its more of a soft check to a ton of different mons, so it doesn't really feel like it fulfills my builder checklist. grass ho-oh is another thing entirely though, that mon softchecks the entire tier bar koraidon after tera, and patches up legitimately every matchup. zacian was standard sd steel, with trail to act as pseudo speed control on this six. koraidon was standard tera steel, this was because i generally dont count zacian as a real steel, and i think koraidon should usually be tera steel if you dont have a kingambit or an ndm, or some dark type, as steel korai help vs iron defense calm mind ndm + opposing sub or taunt steel koraidon. other than those guys, this team had some weird eving and sets so i'll go thru them now.
so eternatus was LO draco, which i believe was a guaranteed OHKO on opposing eternatus + generally a nice trade mon. draco to ohko other etern and trade well into groudon / ndm / arceus + tspikes seemed like a generally good choice vs other offense. tera steel has some utility to beat revenging zacian and koraidon, though it was mostly a flavorof the week tera, fairy or fire or dragon are all like fine. specs lunala was an idea i ripped from frito and kate before scl. 44 def lives 5 hit LO scale on lead, though this isnt a hugely relevant calc. but modest is nice to have some insane damage on Ho-Oh, giving u the two shot on it. specs lunala completely destroys a lot of balances naturally, especially those without ting or kingambit, while also acting as a pseudo ogre lead check, since it trades incredibly favorably into kyogre. next, we had a pretty bulky leftovers ekiller. 184 attacks evs and adamant nature guarantees the oneshot on koraidon after two swords dances. the bulk isnt specifically for anything, but it helps trading against zacian and koraidon, both of which could be annoying without a scarfer or fairy ho oh / fight move zacian. taunt shuts down a lot of cheese and stall in general.
this team was pretty cool if i say so myself. huge fan of how specs lunala plays, and this might've been the only ekiller team i created this tour. hard to fit that guy sometimes outside of HO but he meshed nicely on this. specs lunala won this game handily and taunt ekiller shut down iron defense ndm from last mon cheesing us. not much to say, this was a pretty clear win just off preview and lead.
so right now we were in a good ass spot. scottie was our opponent this week and generally loaded either cookie cutter HO or passive balances with waterceus. the teams i was building for this week was just a buncha different balance breakers that could have passable HO matchup too. that includes shit like sd groudon, band ho-oh, band koraidon, cm 3a arceus, and even chi-yu . nah chi-yu kinda heater into balances, it has good odds to 2shot waterceus and ho-oh in sun, so you can prettymuch autoclick fire move. it does have zero defensive utility though which sucks, and why i scrapped it. but its a nice mon and i'd like to eventually figure it out. we ended up on a sd groudon hatterene scarf ho-oh structure. think the groudon didnt feel quite that great on this, especially since it made some kyogre matchups awkward, so we swapped it out for eternatus. i did like this six quite a bit, but in general im hesistant to load the classic scarf ho-oh and hatterene core, cuz its super weak to flame charge koraidon and my teams are generally on the frailer side anyways. i thought hatterene wasn't a super crazy pick into us and i liked the utility of a defensive ghostceus vs opposing ndms and koraidons, so rocks wisp ghostceus came in clutch. usually into an ndm user i would not load up substeel koraidon, but i think this team looked solid enough into the steels with low kick kingambit and wisp ghostceus. speaking of low kick gambit, i'm a huge fan of this set. i think the ghost types in this tier are phenomenal, and in return gambit is also phenomenal. low kick gambit has pretty much identical calcs into everything bar fairyceus (which it is hard walled by, but they do tera sometimes so not so bad). it checks other gambit super well, has good calcs into tera dark setup like idcm ndm, and is a super nice tool vs ekiller. dragon tail eternatus is here to phaze out any of the tera poison calm mind arceus formes that can get out of hand vs this team, since it lacks a bit of breaking power. i was shuca here to get a immediate toxic off on groundceus / groudon, because it sucks to take a blades on hatterene when you try to block hazards and then get owned by koraidon later. tera grass was a secondary emergency out vs these guys in case groundy/groudon got out of hand. lum on gambit is just to catch wisp arceus mainly. leftovers was also entirely fine here, but with ho-oh wisp ghosty and shuca etern, we felt that balloon was unneeded, and lum would be useful in endgames vs waterceus / ho-oh without popping a tera fire especially since this koraidon set loves to be a tera hog.
so we won the week early and fade subbed out, so i got a chance to get on the board. scottie also subbed out though, so i played dugtrio is broken, chill guy good player. he loaded up the HO that scottie used before, i believe? it was an icemaster HO if i remember correctly, but like. on preview you generally think hatterene scarf ho oh farms most HOs especially glimm HO. the weird interaction was that however, before we won the week, fade suggested fairy move on hatt over psychic move. i didnt really think on this too much but it seemed better for most things? pain split beats a lot of things already and nuzzle is always the free click but i forgot that psy noise was actually pretty useful for glimmora. since i did play this game i'll go over some key turns / sequences that set the outcome.
kind of awkward start for me since hatt cant touch glimm. but glimm cant touch hatt either so whatever. dib opts to go to lunala, and since it takes gleam and doesn't reveal leftovers (and then clicks focus as i go eternatus), i'm pretty sure its meteor beam. getting a toxic off and phazing lunala without taking any chip puts me in a prime position to win this game, and the dtail off on ndm on turn 10 into flame on ndm on turn 12 gives me a lot of momentum. playing around lum ndm and tera is always a bit awkward but i beat ndm although i take a lot of damage. luckily hatt gets an hwish off and ghosty is back in prime position to check zacian and koraidon and ekiller. tera fire koraidon is a menace that forces my ghostceus out, but i sack eternatus and win the sucker war with gambit. at this point with tera, scarf ho-oh, and full health kingambit, i can cleanly beat zacian ekiller and the low health ndm. i think in hindsight i shouldve sacked ghostceus since they for sure click flare as scale shot doesn't kill, and then i can go to ho-oh to just flare blitz spam? i still go gambit on ekiller but if its trail zacian it doesnt beat gambit or koraidon, and if its not trail ho oh farms.
this was the first week i was officially playing ubers, cuz fade got jailed to nu hell. i think the main idea i wanted to work with here was LO tera fire koraidon to just nuke through ho-oh and any of her weird tera mons etc. lo korai absolutely smoked her fairyceus usage too. i didn't have a super clear idea of prepping this week otherwise though, so i just massbuilt a bunch of lo koraidon teams until one clicked. this was the first full hyper offense we used this tour and it has a decent amount of unconventional sets. so obviously koraidon and lunala are super standard, sd lo tera fire and agility meteor beam but with emergency tera dark for other lunala and idcm ndm. i threw ice fang on zacian in case i loaded into some lando, which was quite annoying for this team, since it could get rocks up early vs zacian and throw off lunalas defensive utility heavily, especially since it wasnt optimal for me to run tera steel zacian on this six since tera electric had good matchups vs her standard structures while keeping some defensive utility. ndm is running trick room, but i had a bunch of speed on it to creep most defensive ho-ohs, so you can just click sd and oneshot them without getting sacred fired / wwinded out on tr. tera steel ndm has some crazy calcs, like oneshotting zacian with unboosted tera steel sunsteel, oneshotting lunala through shadow shield at +2, even having good odds to oneshot tera steel koraidon at +2. waterceus is also running a slightly weird set, instead of some sort of utility hwish + status or just stadnard recover calm mind, we have cm 3a with grass knot last (which hits opposing waterceus and kyogre). the main idea of this was just to have the strong trading ability of a waterceus but without the clear weakness into opposing waterceus and kyogre (and its grass knot over thunder for the off chance of dealing with roar/dtail waterceus in sun).
the first few turns of this game set me up super nicely. glimmora died to ekiller but not without putting it into zacian range. if i revenge ekiller with zacian, kate only has a few options:
A. go pecharunt immediately, which can absorb tspikes and then pshot into koraidon and maybe feign scarf
B. go ho-oh and sacred. this is a pretty standard line and should work in most games. has no risk mainly
C. go koraidon and pray for no fairy move (could be a reasonable set guess but not really a safe line i'd suppose)
Out of these, she goes for the line which I believe has best odds without clicking tera, which is to go Ho-Oh. Ho-Oh is generally a big menace for this team, and most of my sets are teched pretty well for it. t4 might be the single most important one in this game, as i essentially win the game off this turn vs Ho-Oh. Generally on a team with ekiller, kyogre, zacian, and a pecharunt, i'd say you prefer spdef Ho-Oh, but I also knew Kate liked running a decent bit of speed on her Ho-Oh from other tours. tera electric zacian vs a fully physdef ho-oh has like 40% odds to kill, which is far too risky to take here when i have immediate lines vs ho-oh. but from the context i have, i can reasonably say its closer to 80/90% that I kill and end the game, so I tera zacian and take my kill. from here i trade favorably onto pecharunt, lunala gets an entry and gets a kill onto zacian, then kills kyogre and heavily chips koraidon. arceus and ndm clean this game up and i don't even reveal koraidon set. i think i sequenced this game pretty much perfectly and i'm quite proud of it.
honestly this might be the first time all tour i built a team on day 1 and just locked it in. i don't think this team is particularly insane but i liked a lot of the sets on it that just blended together. i never revealed some of this shit but i don't mind showing it now anyways. i wanted to cover pretty much everything as mashing is a heavy prepper and generally can play most styles of teams. generally i am a fan of fairyceus structures because of how consistent they are into koraidon, and how easily you can build around them. but i really wanted to mess with super bulky lunala and groundceus, so i aimed for the goal of just having 6 mons that could 1v1 koraidon and win. lunala was wisp which came in clutch vs zacians / koraidons / some setup arcs, and was ev'd to eat 2 zacian blades and oneshot koraidon after a defense drop. eternatus on this team was sitrus physdef to also eat 5 hit scale from korai and oneshot back. groundceus was super physdef tera fairy, wasn't amazing into koraidon because it lacks some damage, but it does sit on korai a bit better than other sets. i think it was ev'd to eat 2 zacian blades as well? koraidon was just standard scarf, though tera dark for emergencies vs lunala and ndm. kyogre was offensive here, since the other mons were all super bulked for koraidon anyways and i had decent trading vs kyogre. i never revealed this one but zacian was solar blade. this move is an insane tech into groudon teams and pretty much instawins the matchup a lot of the time by just oneshotting groudon. i think zacian really only needs blade and wild in 99% of games so that last slot has a lot of flexibility, though obviously cc is the most consistent.
looking back this team is a little weird. it doesn't break particularly well, though off ogre does help. its not super defensively sound but its not awful by any means.
unfortunately, despite the prep with lunala and etern made to beat koraidon handily, i loaded into dialga, which i expected to antilead my kyogre or eternatus. i led groundceus to take it on, but encountered a koraidon on lead. i think i could've played the first few turns a bit better, but after eqing the koraidon for 44 i was put in a predicament. i could either stay vs flare / scale korai and trade with it, or i could go lunala hard on low kick and kill it with psyshock, since ho oh terapagos might be doomed for lunala anyways. i chose to stay with ground, guessing that low kick was less likely than taunt on this team. unfortunately for me, this start set me pretty behind and forced me to tera my kyogre else I lose the game.
i think i played the midgame extremely well though after teraing ogre to kill koraidon. i got like 30 turns straight correct, healing up my groundceus again and pivoting around fairyceus dialga and terapagos. unfortunately, mashing was tera poison taunt cm fairyceus, and regardless of this early i think i was doomed vs this set without lunala alive, or dragon tail on eternatus.
this game could've been played better and my key takeaway was to lead eternatus, it gave me much better odds into lead koraidon, i could always switch out vs dialga even if i'm losing some momentum, but the game also soured me on groundceus. this was our second loss this season, and my only loss this tour.
i think my key takeaway during prep here was that I wanted to cover the two types of teams Icemaster used: HO and Groudon balance. this generally meant having good lines into zacian / ndm, vs sd koraidon, terapagos, and having a nice way to break groudon ho oh balances. midway through prepping i thought about specs etern being potentially insane into his balances, and trying to build around it to cover the HO matchup. so i suppose you're wondering what specs eternatus does. the main things are:
- oneshot groudon with draco meteor, which ice tended to lead in most games.
- two shot physdef ho-oh with dynamax cannon
- oneshot max hp kyogre with tera dragon draco meteor
- force a recover on any bulky ndm switching into dmax or draco
all of this and a nice speed tier to threaten calm mind arcs made specs etern pretty appealing, so i spent the week structuring around it. i figured specs etern blowing up groudon / ho oh / ogre naturally paired well with the classic kyogre fairy lando core, and I went spout kyogre in case of any stalls that could've gotten loaded. cm taunt fairy is a classic, and i was tera fire here to have more utility into HO + ho oh matchup, specifically vs koraidon and zacian. scarf koraidon is also here as the standard catch all HO mon. you throw this guy on a team and expect him to farm all 6 mons on HO. the weird tech here, besides specs etern of course, is balloon ghost kingambit. obviously, this intuitively makes some sense given gambits crippling fighting weakness and ground weakness. but i specifically wanted this set, plus low kick, to hard wall icemasters ekillers, which only ran earthquake and normal moves. gambit already covers a lot of this team by helping with the lunala matchup in conjunction with tauntcm fairy, while also shutting down most ndms due to the natural typing and air balloon.
i'd say i loaded into a pretty good matchup, basically the kind of structure i would expect from icemaster. generally, i'd say my lando usage (which wasn't super absurd this tour) warrants tera steel zacian usage. ice pops tera early to get rid of my lando, but scarf koraidon in the back manages to clean up zacian. gambit can now immediately check the incoming ekiller with tera ghost. later on, fairyceus and ndm rolls reveal that its max attack, which likely means jolly. kingambit at this point is in prime position to just win the game as Ice's groudons generally cannot do much more to flying mons besides status them. kingambit kills all but ndm, and I lose the sucker war to ndm at the end. but since ndm revealed jolly much earlier in the game, koraidon gets a clean oneshot on it, and the game ends.
I think there were some unclean turns, and I could have made more plays. t1 i think icemaster has to respect sitrus eternatus, so going lunala is always the play, and therefore i get free momentum to click dynamax cannon. on turn 20 if i dclaw again and get a favorable roll, groudon dies and then i likely just win game. of course, i don't know ice's spread for sure, and my tools look like i can still win this game without risking the burn from not killing. but similar to the kate game, this probably was in my favor due to ice's love for speed creep. still not really an egregious turn. what might have been egregious is turn 27, not clicking sludge bomb. i thought lunala was zero bulk from earlier turns, and as such guessed gambit always revenged. but i didn't know that for certain, and i think clicking sludge bomb and fishing poison once wouldve been optimal? and then i try to double on ndm into koraidon and click flare and run the sequence back. think this one is kind of dicey and an uncertain line though.
my prep was good, i love how this team plays, and it has an appropriate amount of heat. i do think i could consider shadow ball on eternatus to hit lunala hard, but not a big deal.
so by w9 we had not used a single webs, and it was not in my scout from upl either. i thought that offensive cm arcs had great matchups into entro in general, but it was hard to structure teams that were good into HO with cm3a arcs, due to their lack of bulk and speed control. it took a few different builds and looking into his usage, but i think the six i came up with was pretty solid. skill swap bee covers hatterene, which was a reasonable pick into my glimmora and defensive etern usage, and terapagos covered any anti bee setup on lead like tera ndm / zacian / kyu-b which i could feasibly see loaded into me. ghostceus was the man of honor that this team was built around. sub catches twave from kyogre and arceus formes while letting you catch gambit on sucker wars, since gambit teams generally just lose to tera ghost ghostceus after it goes down. speaking of tera ghost ghostceus, its not a super new innovation, but entro liked to bulk out his koraidons a lot, and that made rocks with +1 judgement be unlikely to kill. tera ghost would immediately pop those koraidons and likely all mons on the field. zacian was tera fight close combat and trail, since i found some matchups vs lunala and scarf lando to be awkward without a ground immune or a ground immune tera. tera fight seemed important for also helping power through bulky koraidons while helping vs annoying dd air balloon ndms. his ho-oh usage was pretty low and was usually scarf too, so i opted to just ignore coverage for it, and ran wild on koraidon for that situation instead. kyogre was mystic water, which is a tech i saw from punny in wcop finals tiebreak. i liked the calcs into stall and kyogre offense, and in general felt that boots koraidon could get out of hand vs this team, so having an immediate hard out along with some power vs stall would be enough.
webs was super useless this game though lol. i fished toxic spikes since i had brought eternatus or glimmora almost every single week, but glimmora was annoying. i had to pop immediate tera for screens koraidon as i truly did not have much counterplay for screens. t12 was probably the deciding turn, as I guess groundceus was not tera ground on this six and click flare blitz to trade with groundceus. the good thing about this specific mu was that i was only facing 3 actual pokemon, so i had the resources and ability to trade koraidon and tera super freely. to my luck, entro clicks tera fairy on groundceus, but koraidon kills groundceus with flare blitz. this tera ends the game, and after this, kyurem is the only remaining pokemon, but it can never win without tera against zacian + terapagos, so the game is over.
i liked the webs into his general scout, but it definitely did not get a great matchup here. i wouldn't recommend using this one into just anyone, as it does fish tspikes and some ho-oh structures quite a bit. but its a decent six with room to be modified for sure.
now we're at the last game i played! it was a rematch vs frito, though i guess not quite because fade had played her last time. frito is super knowledgable in this tier and a huge prepper, so I wanted to cover all matchups if possible. the main things i did notice were a lack of ndm and ho-oh usage, which gave me some flexibility to bring one of my favorite underrated ubers, deoxys-attack. (with techs to beat both of those mons just in case). originally i was testing a bunch of eject pack deoxys-attack structures, which let me click psycho boost vs lead kyogre and gain a bunch of momentum, without having to play the kyogre mirror game. eventually though, i felt like i'd rather have the snowball capability of sash deo-a against a variety of lead pokemon that frito used, including lunala / groudon / kyogre / scarf koraidon / tspikes eternatus. generally on lead people do not stay in vs deo-a unless they are sash or faster, so you can get a free plot off and snowball from that. i originally was tera stellar to get the guaranteed KO vs zacian-c with psycho boost, but found tera ghost to be more applicable especially against ekiller teams. tera ghost lets deoxys oneshot ndm at +2 while obviously blocking espeed revenge attempts. generally against teams that dont have real speed control bar ekiller, sash plot deo-a acts as an "i will click better than you and win". since +2 deo-a has no real counterplay, you have the ability to make plays vs their obvious switches to catch psycho boost drops, or force a tera and gain momentum. frito, like me, seemed like a huge fan of ghosts. I didn't want to just load another kingambit and i couldn't figure out a viable six for chien pao other than sash on some HO-style structure (which funnily enough, ended up being what she loaded into me? which means we were THIS close to seeing a chienpao HO mirror in scl semis). but yea, returning back to the main point, i expected ghosts, primarily lunala, and figured that my counterplay would not just be loading a dark, but instead bulking out my pokemon as entro does. my koraidon was ev'd for +1 tera ghost lunala, as these kyogre fairy lando teams without gambit often just lose to lunala straight up from this position. i was debating on sets but opted for double speed boost taunt as I didn't think low kick was needed on this six, and taunt helped vs weird tera idcm fairy and ghost. ndm was fast stabs tr sd once again in order to cover the webs matchup and help vs groudon ho oh structures similar to what she loaded into fade in w3. kyogre was just max hp offensive, ev'd to 2shot opposing max hp ogre with some dump in spdef to help pivot around cm groundceus. fairyceus was wisp because i found myself having difficult lines lategame vs ekiller and ndm, and roar gave me a nice out into flame charge koraidon that could get past lando, considering kyogre often gets traded very early on in game. i rarely click rocks on lando tbh and i expected her to bring a lunala, so i figured crunch was optimal last.
yea so i loaded into chien pao deoxys-speed HO. deo-a really only has two flat out matchups that it cant get an advantageous lead position in: deoxys-speed, and glimmora. sash is pretty useless later in the game for me anyways, so i figured just antileading would be nice. i think this game was pretty flowchart up until turn 6, where i made a greedy read on no ice shard with my scarf lando to break chien-pao's sash. wisp fairyceus comes in clutch, luckily not getting flinched and beating sd pao without taking any damage. her kyogre comes in, and we trade kyogres as one does when playing sv ubers. at this point i have a +1 bulky tera fire taunt koraidon ready to win this game. she reveals iron defense on turn 16, which guarantees the win for me. i should have won the game here flat out! but i click scale shot into fairyceus, not bothering to calc that flame charge 2shots koraidon anyways. because of this, sun runs out and fairyceus ends up back in front of my koraidon after some pivoting. here i make the second choke, clicking flame charge instead of taunt on turn 22. clicking taunt here, especially with my current hp invest, should ensure i live 2 judgements and at worst get 70% off on fairyceus, and at best win the game flat out. because of this, turn 25 gets a bit dicey. if she goes hard koraidon on sd and tera fires, i just lose the game. if she doesnt recover and judges as i read the hard koraidon, i lose the game. i click sd hoping she judges or recovers, and game is won.
got a lot dicier than it should have because I did not play as clean of an endgame game as I could have. that misplay is on me, and I'll learn from it. but i was a huge fan of my team this week, despite the fact that deo-a did nothing.
overall, i'm happy with the teams I built this tour, the games they were used in, and my record and the gibles ubers slot record. I really want to thank Feliburn and Accel for giving me another shot at starting. I thought I was doomed after some terrible records in previous scls, but you gave me another chance at showing people that I do know this tier quite well. This was by far my best official experience, the team environment was super fun to be in, and I'm looking forward to potentially showing what i can do and improving my play in future ubers tours.
my teams will be here too if anyone wants to rock with them in future tours or just take them for a spin on ladder. https://pokepast.es/c1d333e4a5383d48
if you got through the whole thing, thanks for viewing and peace.
