Love the team, well played.I believe this team was originally made by Pride. I was deciding between a few UUs and I went with Torterra. I also wanted to use Vaporeon since nobody brought it after ppl were worried about sub pass (lol). Turn 3 Toxic is very helpful. Turn 6 I actually misclicked and meant to hit toxic spikes but spikes ended up being better, nice. Turn 10, I get parad on rocks. I think the only mistake I made all game was I should’ve just spiked again w forre instead of going Torterra on SD. I fought through a good bit of hax this game so happy I won, I needed to be very careful of Suicune because if he has rocks and is +1 my Zapdos dies and it kind of just beats me by itself. Basically, as long as my Zapdos wasn’t paralyzed or tricked it could win.
Love the team, well played.
What was the 4th move on Forretress?
If I had been you there, I would have slotted Heal Bell on Vaporeon since you have two rest users. He saw the HP:Elec coming from Vaporeon which is surprising to me since most people I fight on ladder with Vaporeon will just leave Gyara in and EQ it. I don't run HP:Elec though, either Ice Beam or mono attack.
I really like Vaporeon. Latias, Heartran and Suicune seem nearly ubiquitous in SPL and common on ladder. All of those struggle to hit Vaporeon. Suicune with CM and HP:Elec could threaten it, I like roar to just phase it and try to wear it down with hazards.
Could you elaborate on why you hate your week 5 team so much? Just experience from running it? I think leading with rest-talk Rotom is a bit strange but otherwise it looks like a somewhat standard team.
Agree Clef is cheesy. I think Iron Head Jirachi needs to go because its just such a luck based move and Ive seen people flinch down mons like Skarmory that they have no business beating with it. Clef and the stall teams it enables are pretty oppressive though.
View attachment 622331 Gl to both players View attachment 622332
I expect to see great teams and not paraspam.
i would still be strongly against any action on jirachi. i don't think it can just be slapped on every single team. jirachi lacks inherent offensive power that many other pokemon have, so it's not suitable for heavily offensive teams. it's undeniable that jirachi is not the most centralizing pokemon in this tier at the moment, it's latias, by usage and by team structure.
i just don't think jirachi is broken. it's 100% understandable to find iron head frustrating to play against and degenerate. i think there's enough counterplay and that it doesn't put a major strain on teambuilding, so i don't have any issues with it. i think dpp is in a great spot and i would not support making any changes. especially one that would completely turn the tier on its head and change everything we know about it.
if you want to make the argument that jirachi facilitates paralysis-abusing teams to an unhealthy degree, that is a different discussion to be had tho. but iron head is a dead end because we can't suspect it alone (which i would support because the community as a whole would support it and i still consider myself to have an open mind and be receptive to discussion about jirachi). let's do another post-spl survey and see what people who played/were involved with spl think before we make any sweeping conclusions.
if jirachi is banned metagross can't fill its roles easily at all. they're totally different pokemon.You can easily replace Metagross with Jirachi on big 6.
i'm down for a jira-less slot in dpppl i think that's a good idea.We should not wait for a survey when DPP PL starts in a week and we can use that to test a rachi-less meta.
as you saw in spl, froslass ban changed basically nothing about the tier. jirachi isn't looked at because of what you said: it's one of the most relevant pokemon in the metagame. it shouldn't be banned unless it's a serious, detrimental issue and the tier is very good right now (altho we can get a clearer picture with a survey abt tier satisfaction).If our council banned Froslass for being uncompetitive - why are we not looking at Jirachi that has probably 1000x the usage and is infinitely better and more annoying in every way.
One of the cases where policy which is supposed to be practical, becomes impractical and we are not allowed to make objectively good decisions in tiering.The refusal to axe Iron Head (in whatever capacity, as a whole / on Rachi / 20% and higher flinch moves) is one of Smogon bureaucracy's great failures
I stand by what i've been saying for the past year and a half and I think there are currently three issues with Jirachi :
- The mon by itself is completely uncompetitive, this season again we've seen a bunch of situations where jirachi was one flinch away or one fire punch burn away from stealing a game and/or beating a supposed counter (20% ice punch is also absolutely ridiculous as we've seen it this season freezing a Magneton twice in two attempts). This SPL wasn't even the worst we've seen in the jirachi robberies department simply because the two most spammed archetypes (paraspam and stall) are overly preparred to face physical rachi sets (sometimes dealing with physical rachi with their own phys def rachi), any offense builder/player have experienced how absolutely obnoxious and unfair this mon can be. This is the n°1 and most important issue and this will remain problematic regardless of the future meta shifts.
- The uncompetitive mon allows an uncompetitive and absolutely cancerous archetype to exist (and perform), as we've seen this spl with a ridiculous and i think unprecedented paraspam usage. I still stand by what i've been saying this past year, most of the paraspam structures are (heavily) flawed and manageable with the right tools but we're in a very weird state where almost none of the players in the dpp pool this year managed to find proper answers/solutions to beat paraspam consistantly (the two most noticeable paraspam answers we've seen this year were SD Breloom and Toxic Spikes and both were brought in paraspam structures). While some paraspam variants can perform without using jirachi, it is obvious that most of these teams would be unusable with jirachi gone.
- I think that Jirachi being so centralising is one of the main reason stall and paraspam teams are now (apparently) the two most popular archetypes and are considered to be the most spammable/safest teams in the tier because they don't need to fundamentally alter their structure to deal with physical rachi as i said earlier. Overall i think this leads to a loop of meta trends where offensive teams will just end up having less and less options (which is already happening now imo) with only a bunch of restricted offensive structures performing.
On top of being uncompetitive on its own, i think that jirachi creates unhealthy dynamics that just makes the tier worse by the day. I'm confident that paraspam will decline in usage eventually as more builders with different approaches will manage to bring good paraspam solutions without altering their own playstyle too much, but these teams will always exist and will always be brought by some players and that is an issue on its own in my opinion.
Speaking of creating unhealthy dynamics, i think Clefable should be banned as well, its presence just makes the tier worse restricting specially oriented mons way too much and giving stall too many options allowing defensive teams to deal too easily with way too many issues they should be facing, just with 1 slot. Most importantly i think that most of Clef's bad influence on the tier is located in the builder and that's why i think most people still don't realise how obnoxious Clefable is for the tier because we are used to the pressure and limitations it puts on the builder. Take a step back and realise how many options you can't even consider just because of this mon when you're building an offensive team.
I'm 100% convinced that these two mons should be banned or that we should at least experiment a tier without these two at a large enough scale and with enough time to see the repercusions.
I have seen a lot of people complaining about Latias and i completely understand why, I still think that this mon's presence is overall positive as it gives good options for both offensive and defensive teams and makes some structure more flexible and versatile. Of course if Jirachi goes Latias would have to go immediately after, i don't think it would be bearable without rachi in the tier.
Same goes for Spore, this move is absolutely dumb let's be honest. The complaints are fair, but in the current situation i'm skeptical about banning it right away without nerfing defensive teams in some way.
Last year DBC and I raised some concerns regarding Machamp, regardless of the paraspam trend. I still think that this mon is extremely stupid and borderline uncompetitive, of course not close to Jirachi's level as Machamp has way more natural weaknesses but godamn can this mon be dumb and win games it should have no business winning.
I'd like to hear everyone's opinion on these mons and on a general level on the state of the tier. I know i have been annoying complaining about the games this past SPL but i truly feel like this tier doesn't get the treatment it deserves. Whatever happens next i think we should wait for Jirachee's invitational to happen before taking any actions.
No offense to any of the players involved this SPL, i'm not blaming anyone in particular and you just bring w/e the fuck you wanna bring anyway, but this SPL was the most atrocious and depressing DPP tour i've witnessed since i started playing this game and i know that i'm far from being the only one feeling this way. Gratz to Dridri for the well deserved red and insane debut on smogon.
Some may say that Machamp is "healthy" for the tier because it punishes teams that are not prepared for it, but I don't think it's a fair ask to have teams to be solid against something like Machamp. The only purpose Dynamic Punch serves is to hax the opponent, and Cross Chop is a healthier alternative to it.
Lot to respond to.. but I almost never run jirachi and I dont struggle with latias too much. Zong has options, Ttar can trap it, even Vaporeon can check it.I don't believe people saying that Lati into a Jirachi less meta won't be