Awesome post
god mami chan tysm for sharing!! Your NU core was excellent this season and I hope you guys keep playing the tier in the future '-'
Looking back, I think Escavalier, Gallade, Duraludon, and Ninjask should all have been regularly monitored/voted on; Duraludon in particular is a mon that evolved more and more as the meta went on, where sets like Sub+IDef existing alongside standard fare like Specs made it unpredictable, leaving you initially unsure of what checks to preserve. For Escav/Gallade, I honestly stopped thinking of the latter 2 as actively broken just because I tried to pressure them as much as I could with speed control, immunities that make choiced gallade 50-50, and so on, but they were probably overcentralizing (particularly Gallade). Ninjask was an incredible pain to prep for in the builder and could still be extremely effective when you do prep for it. Voting more during Snake would have been very nice and is something to consider for future tiering policy here.
Anyways, Excal's post inspired me to dump some of my cool ideas as well.
Clefairy @ Eviolite
Ability: Magic Guard
EVs: 252 HP / 208 Def / 48 Spe <- creep as much as u want
Bold Nature
IVs: 0 Atk
- Calm Mind
- Flamethrower
- Moonblast
- Soft-Boiled
Kushalos brought this against me in a test game one week, wk5/6?, so all credit to him for the idea. Due to the late metagame being very reliant on Toxic/passive damage, I think CM Clef could have been very dangerous ... if it's faster than your Escavalier, but it never ended up being used. When I tested vs Kushalos, we both had arbitrary speed creep on Escav / Clefairy; my Escav at 120 Speed outsped his 118 Speed Clefairy, otherwise it would have 6-0d. In the end of the meta, when Clef KOd common steels like Ferro/slow Escav + was able to boost out of range of the most common Poison type, Weezing, this would have been awesome.
Bouffalant @ Lum Berry / Chople Berry
Ability: Sap Sipper / Reckless
EVs: 48 HP / 252 Atk / 208 Spe
Adamant Nature
- Swords Dance
- Head Charge
- Throat Chop
- Close Combat
A week or two after the Trev craze started I really wanted us to use Bouffalant, either CB or SD like the above set. I thought it would be very effective at facilitating sweeps from something like Ninjask, because it is able to force in physical walls like Mudsdale/Weezing and absolutely fuck them up. There were not many normal resists in this tier, something
Sjneider (I think you invented this?) took advantage of with Choice Scarf Silvally-Normal. This would really enable something like Ninjask, I think, which gets very scary when those physical walls are gone.
Electric-Types:
Raichu @ Life Orb
Ability: Lightning Rod
EVs: 252 SpA / 4 SpD / 252 Spe
Timid Nature
IVs: 0 Atk
- Nasty Plot
- Thunderbolt
- Grass Knot
- Focus Blast
Silvally-Electric @ Electric Memory
Ability: RKS System
EVs: 252 SpA / 4 SpD / 252 Spe
Timid Nature
IVs: 0 Atk
- Thunderbolt
- Ice Beam / Surf
- Flamethrower
- Parting Shot
There are very few Grass-types in NU (unless you're bugzinator, in which case you use some random af mon like roselia / appletun / silvally-grass on every team and successfully prove that they are good). I thought that Electric-types with coverage for Mudsdale would be able to effectively take advantage of this. I used the Raichu on webs, letting you outspeed Specs Whimsi (boots is annoying tho); however, it was really hard to get it into battle due to its fragility. This meant i didn't bring it, though if i found a good pshotter/slow pivot it could have been great.
The Silvally-Electric was intended for the middle of the meta, when Miltank wasn't that common, but still put in some work once it was a common mon. Basically, you'd be able to break through anything besides very fat special walls (Miltank / Clef) with your excellent coverage, and then Parting Shot out to Escavalier (CB or SD) to fire off strong attacks at them. The core worked very well, we never ended up using Elecvally though :/
Liepard @ Expert Belt
Ability: Limber
EVs: 252 Atk / 4 SpA / 252 Spe
Naive Nature
- Knock Off
- Grass Knot
- Gunk Shot / Psycho Cut
- U-turn / Sucker Punch
Flames. Budget Absol. I told
aim "yo you have no dark resist" like 5-10 separate times this season, so at one point I thought that it would be cool to take advantage of other teams' lack of dark resists (especially with Gallade > Sawk as the Fighting-type). You can tear through a lot of walls with this, particularly since Grass Knot takes out Mudsdale after a little chip. Although Miltank isn't 2HKOd, you can Knock its Boots/Lefties, pivot out, then frustrate it with hazard stack. Gunk Shot can eliminate fairies for the team, though often Knocking a Clef would be enough, so you could run Psycho Cut for Weezing.
We didn't use this but, again, I think it was a cool mon. Like Persian-Alola except doesn't switch into things but puts far more chip damage on the opponent.
Malamar @ Leftovers
Ability: Suction Cups
EVs: 252 HP / 252 Def / 4 SpD
Impish Nature
- Block
- Rest
- Acupressure
- Knock Off
LMFAOOOOO man this wouldve been fuckin hilarious. Ok so we played RW who brought close to the same Stunfisk-Galar defensive cores every week and thought 'yo, what wins against all of these' and decided we really wanted to try to lure it in, trap it with something, and just win.
Sadly this doesn't trap Stunfisk-Galar. It traps Mudsdale, though, so we wanted to save it to use against a Mudsdale spammer. The opportunity never arose :'(
==========
Finally, the squad aim used against Kushalos looked very out of place in the NU meta so I figured I'd explain that a bit.
Ok so, quick story time. Joey was begging us to use jolteon all week LOL we tried to make Trick Ring Target work for like 4 days and it didn't because it's extremely gimmicky.
pokeaimMD11/01/2020
PDt REVISE JOLT PLS
pdt11/01/2020
UH OH
Expulso WE HAVE A MISSION
Expulso11/01/2020
Oh god oh fuck
Ok so what are the scenarios where youd rather use jolteon than rotom
^^ there were no good answers to this question LOL we thought abt trying specs with Rising Voltage alongside Pincurchin but then realized that, too, sucked. (I wanted to use solo Pincurchin because electric + water... but forgot it had 15 base speed, tragic).
Then we realized that Specs is actually acceptably strong, and that it isn't totally invalidated by Mudsdale if we have Pokemon in the back that mke the opponent need to keep health on Mudsdale. Thus, we tried to overload Mudsdale with Jolteon + Rhydon + Mawile; the Rhydon + Mawile core was one I remembered seeing on
Ho3nConfirm3d's HO week 3/4 vs neider, and I also liked it due to the ability to take advantage of Ninjask, one of the tier's biggest threats.
With the Mudsdale overload core in place, we wanted to be able to switch into and wall it after something like Jolteon chips it; Helmet Pain Split Weezing + Cramorant gave us enough insurance against Mudsdale. Finally, I felt like we were weak to fairies with only answers being Mawile (horrendous spdef) and Weezing (they get Psychic), so i slapped on utility Rapidash.
Then we added Magnet Rise over Iron Head on SD Mawile just to have another way to chip Mudsdale, wouldve been hilarious if that scenario worked out but alas.
Toxic Spikes on Weezing wouldve been awesome, I chose just Toxic though bc otherwise Cram comes in and freely Defogs them away unless u get a sludge bomb poison (and even then it still defogs on you pretty decently).
As a side note, Neutralizing Gas Weezing is a good tech now to get em up on Xatu, someone should try that ;o
============
I had a lot of fun following the NU meta over this time, despite a few overly centralizing Pokemon I thought it was very interesting to see the meta evolve so much over time. For instance, RU looked a lot more similar from beginning to end than this tier did.
I hope the NU community continues to grow and becomes more active, the tier itself was enjoyable (again, despite not voting on some questionable things near the end) and I loved the evolution. Seeing some newer faces getting into the tour scene this NU Snake (such as
your____bro Meri Berry) is really great, I hope they keep at it.
I encourage everyone reading this (even older players, ppl not in NU, etc) to pull up to the
NU discord and start some discussion about the tier, it's a little less active than other Discords but I know I really enjoy talking about the meta so let's get it poppin
Once again shoutout to aim for the great season and
PinkDragonTamer Rabia (yes despite some horrid hot takes) for being awesome building support, glad we got to use a lot of creative ideas, bummer that the ones above didn't hit the field lol.
Thanks guys, was fun, Expulso out '-'
The Roselia Advocates congratulate the goat 
