**General Summary** **Read this first!** I have a habit of talking out of my ass, so I'm just going to sum up the whole post here. The first few paragraph is a rant about how much and why I hate scarf tricking, but the rest is my search for a scarf-trick counter and my invitation to post your strategies for beating or playing around scarf-trick.
Viable Strategies posted:
Admit that trickscarf is broken and use it to counter enemy trickscarf
Use Gastrodon over Swampert (recover yay?)
Switch in choice scarf Tyranitar and use Pursuit (Wi-Fi only)
Scarf tricking has become the most influential, and in my opinion most damaging, of the new strategies unleashed by Platinum. I might just be set in my ways, but I consider myself pretty adaptable, I had no problems in the transfer from ADV to DP until Garchomp starting mutating into it's current form. However, I recently stopped playing the game out of frustration because of scarf-trick, which destroyed my mostly balanced teams and left me at the mercy of hyper offensive teams that now dominate platinum. There is only one way to prevent the opponent from doing it, which is to have a pokemon that already has choice scarf on your team. It cannot be taunted because of the speed increase. It's effects cannot be reversed once it has been done, unlike stealth rocks. It's effects usually destroy any strategy above *set up stealth rocks* or *attack* that a pokemon would hope to implement on it's own, creating the currently suicidal hyperaggressive zerger metagame and leaving no room for any alternative to succeed, a bandwagon situation.
At first it seemed to me that the only way to counter it was to have a pokemon with choice scarf on the team, and switch it in on the predicted switch. Obviously they would then be locked into trick, and would have to switch, netting me a free turn. While this would only temporarily solve the problem, it was the only solution I could think of. Much to my chagrin, when I tried to implement this strategy, I found that instead of the opponent being locked into trick after swapping choice scarfs, they were free to choose another move and go for the KO! Giving them a bad item like lagging tail, etc was out of the question, as they would just trick it to another pokemon later.
I have been told that this is an error in Shoddy's programming. If it is indeed a mistake and has indeed been fixed since I last played Shoddy, I'll edit my post to match that. As it stands though, scarf-tricking to me is a broken strategy that cannot be countered without using it. That is to say, the only way in my mind to counter scarf-trick is to use scarf-trick. A player who uses this strategy takes absolutely no risk in doing so, as they know that they will
A) neuter one of their opponents pokemon by removing access to it's moves
B) force their opponent to waste a turn by luring out their opponent's scarf and be able to switch out or stay in and attack, without losing a turn in the process.
Basically you can't go wrong by using the trick scarf strategy. Either you get something great or lose nothing. It's probably the only move in the game, aside from stealth rock, that is impossible to mispredict with. I have heard about people "learning how to beat trick". I am interested in what the smogon community has come up with for beating this strategy.
Viable Strategies posted:
Admit that trickscarf is broken and use it to counter enemy trickscarf
Use Gastrodon over Swampert (recover yay?)
Switch in choice scarf Tyranitar and use Pursuit (Wi-Fi only)
Scarf tricking has become the most influential, and in my opinion most damaging, of the new strategies unleashed by Platinum. I might just be set in my ways, but I consider myself pretty adaptable, I had no problems in the transfer from ADV to DP until Garchomp starting mutating into it's current form. However, I recently stopped playing the game out of frustration because of scarf-trick, which destroyed my mostly balanced teams and left me at the mercy of hyper offensive teams that now dominate platinum. There is only one way to prevent the opponent from doing it, which is to have a pokemon that already has choice scarf on your team. It cannot be taunted because of the speed increase. It's effects cannot be reversed once it has been done, unlike stealth rocks. It's effects usually destroy any strategy above *set up stealth rocks* or *attack* that a pokemon would hope to implement on it's own, creating the currently suicidal hyperaggressive zerger metagame and leaving no room for any alternative to succeed, a bandwagon situation.
At first it seemed to me that the only way to counter it was to have a pokemon with choice scarf on the team, and switch it in on the predicted switch. Obviously they would then be locked into trick, and would have to switch, netting me a free turn. While this would only temporarily solve the problem, it was the only solution I could think of. Much to my chagrin, when I tried to implement this strategy, I found that instead of the opponent being locked into trick after swapping choice scarfs, they were free to choose another move and go for the KO! Giving them a bad item like lagging tail, etc was out of the question, as they would just trick it to another pokemon later.
I have been told that this is an error in Shoddy's programming. If it is indeed a mistake and has indeed been fixed since I last played Shoddy, I'll edit my post to match that. As it stands though, scarf-tricking to me is a broken strategy that cannot be countered without using it. That is to say, the only way in my mind to counter scarf-trick is to use scarf-trick. A player who uses this strategy takes absolutely no risk in doing so, as they know that they will
A) neuter one of their opponents pokemon by removing access to it's moves
B) force their opponent to waste a turn by luring out their opponent's scarf and be able to switch out or stay in and attack, without losing a turn in the process.
Basically you can't go wrong by using the trick scarf strategy. Either you get something great or lose nothing. It's probably the only move in the game, aside from stealth rock, that is impossible to mispredict with. I have heard about people "learning how to beat trick". I am interested in what the smogon community has come up with for beating this strategy.
