Isn't this part of why GSC kept Snorlax in OU, because the tier without him was genuinely worse to play with breaking bulky cores?
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Metagame SV OU Metagame Discussion
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Generation people different these days unlike GSC days.
Consider this, though:
Magic Bounce reflects Defog, but still makes Defog go off so it clears hazards (it's as if the Magic Bounce mon used Defog itself). Good as Gold completely prevents said move.
That's a small distinction, but it's a very important one for Gholdengo.
I'm still using booster energy, it is great on offense teams either keeping low walls for others or just sweeping. However, I have seen a couple of tera water to beat Volc or tera fire mons, it is an interesting concept.
Consider that Magic Bounce blocks all hazards and Good as Gold doesn't. If Gholdengo just had Magic Bounce we would likely complain that hazards are impossible to setup instead of impossible to remove.
It's a sidegrade, really.
This. Both Good as Gold and Magic Bounce have their ups and downs. People rag on GaG because on Dengo it blocks all forms of hazard removal, but people don't complain as much about MB even though it blocks hazard setup entirely. I've personally gotten brick walled by MB more than GaG, but that was due to my own greed.
My version of balance is usually:
Phys Def
SpDef
Pivot
Scarf/Speed Control
Phys Atk
SpAtk
I'm sure this isn't optimal, but it's the style I generally like.
Interestingly, Pivot is usually reserved (for me) for one of my two tanks, if not another offensive mon that has good resistances/immunities and gets u-turn or volt switch.
Not a bad style per se, but still decent for a balance team.
Side note, I HATE dealing with matchup phishing teams. It's so damn aggravating. I'd EASILY be at 63% GXE right now if I didn't get matchup phished by Shed Tail Orthworm + Espathra, Tera Bug Ceruledge, and losing to Bulk Up Tusk because it got ONE Rapid Spin off. I'm so mad right now.
Pivot for me is usually a bulky mon that is just a good switch. For instance in Home SWSH I'd define a team this way:
PhysDef = Corviknight
SpDef = Clefable
Pivot = Toxapex
Sp Atk =Dragapult
Phys Atk =Zeraora
Speed = Dragapult
the reason there is two dragapults is because that is all you need /s
Perhaps the craziest part from me is that we now have not one, but two Pokemon at Gen 8 Lando-T levels of usage or higher (see https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/usage-based-tier-update-for-october-2022-november-18.3708628/ for easy comparisons).
In the meantime, Sun 100% needs an abuser or two or congratulations, you just boosted your opponent's Great Tusk and Roaring Moon for no good reason (and it's all thanks to Roaring Moon that all my Dondozos need to be fully physically defensive right now - they used to be specially defensive while Chi-Yu was still free). Perhaps the current abusers just aren't worth it right now.
Dragapult only making it to 11th place feels weird to Gen 8 tracker me, but when there's a new Ghost-type with Gen 8 Lando-T levels of usage who can and will outspeed (and OHKO) Specs Pult with one of its most popular sets, Dragapult dropping is now understandable.
Honestly, Dragapult is one of the more annoying Pokemon that I see around. You can NEVER tell if it's a Wisp + Hex set, a band set, a specs set, or whatever the hell else it wants to do. Also no wonder why people got upset, half of your team is actually stall oriented, even though Electrics run train through your defensive core.
I know that an iron valiant set was posted here not too long ago, but I also have a sd iron valiant set that I think has some potential:
Iron Valiant @ Booster Energy
Ability: Quark Drive
Tera Type: Fire
EVs: 252 Atk / 4 Def / 252 Spe
Jolly Nature
- Swords Dance
- Close Combat
- Knock Off
- Fire Punch
This set allows you to OHKO a lot of pokemon that would normally have a good mu at +2 with tera fire fire punch... and by a lot, I mean just 4 that are fairly relevant, with those pokemon being volcarona(with the standard set, the one running max defense never dies in one hit, but you still beat it), corviknight, amoonguss and scizor.
This doesn't sound like that many pokemon, especially when considering that it still has multiple reliable answers even after tera like great tusk, toxapex, dondozo, etc. but this set is meant to clean up late game after these mons are heavily chipped or gone. Additionally, tera fire also has other benefits. Being immune to burn doesn't seem massive when you already outspeed most will-O-wisp users, but it means it allows you to kill volcarona without risking flame body, which when considering that this mon is designed to deal with it, can be game changing. Additionally, this set allows you to get a free sd from gholdengo(when threatening to revenge kill it)as tera fire means that you take about 60% at most from make it rain and shadow Ball never kills if gholdengo isn't specs or is at +1 or higher. This set also gives you a solid chance at beating spdef dirge, especially if it hasn't already been knocked off, and it's not just good at melting scizor, but it's also good at preventing scizor from melting you with bullet Punch. There are probably more applications to this set, but these are the main ones I can think about.
I want to end this post by saying that iron valiant, an already amazing pokemon, has an insane amount of potential as it's fairly unexplored compared to the tools it can bring to the table. Sd for example only really requires sd, cc, and knock off, and you have a ton room for experimentation in the last slot on that set alone. We even saw tera water liquidation at spl (which btw, is the thing that inspired me to make this set, so shout out to talah for using it), showing that sets like this aren't a gimmick, they're legitimate ways of abusing iron valiant's amazing movepool to great effect and make sets that have the element of suprise, but don't require you catching the opponent off guard in order to work.
I'd love to see someone try to make this firefighter (terrible pun intended) work!
Edit: fixed some typos and added a few things I forgot to write about
Iron Valiant @ Booster Energy
Ability: Quark Drive
Tera Type: Fire
EVs: 252 Atk / 4 Def / 252 Spe
Jolly Nature
- Swords Dance
- Close Combat
- Knock Off
- Fire Punch
This set allows you to OHKO a lot of pokemon that would normally have a good mu at +2 with tera fire fire punch... and by a lot, I mean just 4 that are fairly relevant, with those pokemon being volcarona(with the standard set, the one running max defense never dies in one hit, but you still beat it), corviknight, amoonguss and scizor.
This doesn't sound like that many pokemon, especially when considering that it still has multiple reliable answers even after tera like great tusk, toxapex, dondozo, etc. but this set is meant to clean up late game after these mons are heavily chipped or gone. Additionally, tera fire also has other benefits. Being immune to burn doesn't seem massive when you already outspeed most will-O-wisp users, but it means it allows you to kill volcarona without risking flame body, which when considering that this mon is designed to deal with it, can be game changing. Additionally, this set allows you to get a free sd from gholdengo(when threatening to revenge kill it)as tera fire means that you take about 60% at most from make it rain and shadow Ball never kills if gholdengo isn't specs or is at +1 or higher. This set also gives you a solid chance at beating spdef dirge, especially if it hasn't already been knocked off, and it's not just good at melting scizor, but it's also good at preventing scizor from melting you with bullet Punch. There are probably more applications to this set, but these are the main ones I can think about.
I want to end this post by saying that iron valiant, an already amazing pokemon, has an insane amount of potential as it's fairly unexplored compared to the tools it can bring to the table. Sd for example only really requires sd, cc, and knock off, and you have a ton room for experimentation in the last slot on that set alone. We even saw tera water liquidation at spl (which btw, is the thing that inspired me to make this set, so shout out to talah for using it), showing that sets like this aren't a gimmick, they're legitimate ways of abusing iron valiant's amazing movepool to great effect and make sets that have the element of suprise, but don't require you catching the opponent off guard in order to work.
I'd love to see someone try to make this firefighter (terrible pun intended) work!
Edit: fixed some typos and added a few things I forgot to write about
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Something else I think is important to note about Lando is that you never really had to work to deal with opposing ones when building. You would often find yourself with either a Water-type (hi Gen 6 Washtom) or Ice coverage on something for other threats in the meta. If you somehow didn't have an answer, wearing Lando down with chip was incredibly feasible because it was always switching in to eat hits for teammates and only had Lefties for recovery (if it wasn't Scarf).
Tusk is quite similar in that it has no recovery and can be forced to take chip because it's often being used as a blanket check to a lot of physical attackers.
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With the fresh rise of Orthworm to OU, I'm seeing A LOT of Shed Tail Orthworms in lower OU ladder. Most of them trying to matchup phish and cheese with Shed Tail + Espathra, or the unique one of Shed Tail + Dunsparce.
I am still of the party that Shed Tail is the problem and not Cyclizar. The only reason Orth is back to OU is because of Shed Tail itself lmfao. Also stupid emu remains stupid.
I am still of the party that Shed Tail is the problem and not Cyclizar. The only reason Orth is back to OU is because of Shed Tail itself lmfao. Also stupid emu remains stupid.
While I was of the same mind, I think it's still a bit too early to conclude that, if it remains ou after another shift I'd say that would be more evidence that shed tail was the issue.
While we could say shed tail is the problem is probably correct but orthworm can’t break it like cyclizar can. Also, while espathra can be stupid, if it sets up twice and then you switch into it then that is on you. Game plan is in team preview, gotta see it coming.
I appreciate your viewpoint but I personally disagree with this sentiment. To me, that kind of feels like saying in previous gens that if you allow a Baton Pass chain to get going, it's your fault. I know that Espathra isn't the same as Baton Pass and I'm not trying to construct a strawman, but I feel like it is somewhat analogous as an all or nothing win condition that has enough variability to prevent consistent and reliable counterplay from being guaranteed. In essentially every generation that Baton Pass has been allowed in, including the ones without team preview, you can almost always tell if you're facing a full BP team as soon as the battle loads. However, making sure that your team could counter whatever particular BP variant you were facing while still having your team be sturdy enough against the rest of the meta was too tall of an order for BP to be considered a healthy mechanic, so I believe that it's been banned or heavily restricted in every generation that it has appeared (someone please correct me if I'm wrong about that though; I'm not entirely well versed on the complete history of BP policy across all generations). I've written about this at length before so I won't repeat the points that I, and others, have already made, but Espathra's ability to win on matchup feels unhealthy to me and eliminates much of the ability to "play around it" if you happen to lack a check to whatever set it's running, which mirrors much of the problem surrounding BP. Blunder also draws this comparison in this video of his and he advocates for the eventual ban of Espathra as well. Obviously, it's not like Blunder's word should be taken as gospel but he is an accomplished player and I agree with his position on Espathra (which is also shared by other experienced and accomplished players like ima, FlamingVictini, Bea, and AM, amongst others, I'm sure). So overall, I don't feel like otherwise completely viable teams always have the ability to game plan and play against Espathra, particularly because of Tera providing Espathra with enough important variance to keep it from remaining too predictable, and the arguments levied against Espathra stem mostly from this vantage point, not from the fact that it's simply "too strong" the way that something like Chien-Pao is.
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I've been in the 1600's recently and I'm seeing a lot of teams that are just Orthworm + Grimmsnarl + 4 set-up sweepers, or occasionally with Great Tusk + 3 set-up sweepers. It's an incredibly tedious style of play to go up against. It is so difficult to build a team that consistently has counters to each of, say, Espathra, Dragonite, and Volcarona that can beat them from behind a shed tail with dual screens up. And when you do take one of them out, your reward is gifting a free switch-in to a *different* set-up sweeper that will invariably have a good match-up against your counter to the previous set-up sweeper.
As far as I'm aware, nothing in this meta can stop Grimmsnarl from getting its screens up, unless you can bait it to use Taunt and switch in a Hatterene to Magic Bounce it back, which is quite a niche interaction and not a reliable counter since it requires a decision from your opponent to use Taunt.
Once the screens are up, it's not difficult to get Orthworm in and pass its free Shed Tail to whichever set-up sweeper matches up best against your team. From there it's either gg, or you have to waste far too many resources to eliminate that sweeper, in which case the cycle just repeats again. It's the same issue that people complained about with Cyclizar. Orthworm is objectively a useless pokemon in OU without Shed Tail (I dare anyone to argue in good faith that it would be viable without it), but the utility of Shed Tail has singlehandedly pulled it right into OU.
This also puts further pressure on the team not using Shed Tail to use its Tera to counter whichever sweeper is setting up, as counterplay to certain setup sweepers usually revolves around defensive Tera-ing. This makes it easier for the remaining set-up sweepers to operate without having to worry about your tera. I'm inclined to agree with the people who think this creates an unhealthy dynamic in the metagame.
And I want to finish by saying I do not believe any of Espathra, Dragonite, Volcarona, etc are broken and should be suspected/banned. I think the unhealthy dynamic is created by Shed Tail, not the sweepers themselves.
Joey feels that espathra isn’t broken. In his vid, he stated that players in the SPL were one turn late and if they were to make a better move, espathra wouldn’t have snowballed. I feel that espathra is good in the hands of the pilot but the opponent needs to be equally skilled to make sure it doesn’t snowball. Just because people lose to it shouldn’t be a cry for help. It was literally not broken and we saying it is now. How can that be so? Is it because people lose once and think it’s broken like how people complained endlessly and still do about gholdengo as of now? I’ve lost to iron valiant more than once but nothing happens.
Aside from rambling off-topic, the most common teras are fairy, fighting and fire but fairy being the popular one. Then you have to access if it runs roost, substitute or protect. Either way, it needs two calm minds to start a sweep. One calm mind isn’t enough but there are a lot of dark types that can go against it before it sets up. Ting-Lu is a good example that can ignore stored power and Tera blast/gleam won’t one shot and push it out with WW or Grimm taunt so it can’t set up and needs multiple speed boosts to get going. Sometimes I wonder if removing pao will create an espathra issue post-meta despite how powerful it may be but time will in a few weeks. Even so, garganacl is on everyone’s radar more so than espathra but if espathra reaches top 10 next month, then I would start to worry or look at what makes people complain further but I think tera dark is gonna be the new hip thing when pao leaves because it’s not just espathra. Psyspam is around and probably more deadly than shed tail once imo.
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Yeah, I understand where you're coming from. I've heard people use this replay of elodin vs Ruft from week 1 of SPL as evidence of Espathra being manageable, but it doesn't really convince me of much. If anything, I feel like it kind of speaks to Espathra being unhealthy since Ruft had a team that conceivably was prepared to handle Espathra and he was still just one misplay away from being swept - it doesn't feel right to me how much you need to walk on eggshells around Espathra to prevent just losing on the spot, and even then, it can sometimes be unavoidable depending on Espathra's set. If elodin's Espathra was Tera Fire, it would have swept regardless of how Ruft played the matchup, and it's not like Tera Fire is unheard of on Espathra or anything. In this replay from week 2 of SPL, which Blunder refers to in his video, I don't feel like Welli0u really misplayed at all and he had a few things that I've heard people list as potential checks to Espathra, like Trick Gholdengo, Kingambit, and even Tera Steel Rotom-Wash, but he still couldn't do much to prevent being swept. As I've said before, I understand that this comes down to different philosophical standpoints on tiering but I don't see why a mon that is almost exclusively a 6-0, boom or bust matchup fish should remain in the tier. I also don't feel like tiering action ever does or should take into account how commonly a mon is used since that doesn't always correlate to how a mon impacts the health of a tier; I don't believe that any of the Shadow Tag users or Dug were ever truly amongst the most used mons in the past when they have been banned.
I am open to the idea that Shed Tail is the larger problem than Espathra, but especially with Orthworm being so limited in the number of times it can pass a sub, I don't really see other mons that are as threatening to end a game when past a single sub as Espathra is. I would be open to Shed Tail/Orthworm being examined further but to me, Espathra really feels like the bigger problem.
Ting-Lu is the only good example of a dark type that can go against espathra. Pao, Kingambit, Moon, Meowscarada are all "frail" and get smoked by whatever tera it's running (ok, Kingambit beats tera fairy Espathra, but gets owned by tera fighting and has to get the 50/50 right to tera or not tera into stored power or tera blast fighting). Only phazers like Ting-Lu, strong unresisted priority like Dnite, unaware mons like Dirge or tera dark Clod, or bulky resists like Corv with the right move to hit the chosen tera type can revenge Espathra after one or two turns of setup if you mess up your positioning for even one turn. Espathra puts too much pressure on the non-Espathra user to position perfectly every turn.
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Joey is free to feel how he feels, but that doesn't really actually mean anything in the grand scheme of things. There are other good players who do find Espathra broken. There have been pokemon in the past that were widely viewed as broken that still had some good players who thought they weren't. There's also a good argument to make that teams that are well built can still lose to Espathra if they make one wrong play. Typically, this would be considered a sign of problems as there should realistically be a bit wider room for error against top pokemon if they're balanced.
Where did we as a community decide it literally wasn't broken? There has always been off and on discussion here and there about it being broken or not but a consensus is not really there yet. It's not losing to it that's the issue people have. It's how easily it can snowball out of control, even against a team that should on paper be well prepped for it, because giving it even one turn can be deadly.
It's very not difficult to accrue the calm mind boosts it needs. The types of pokemon Espathra switches in to start setting up on, it's guaranteed one boost as they switch. And generally two if the opponent lacks a way to seriously pressure it after switching, since it's able to invest entirely in bulk. And btw, it needs just two speed boosts to outpace the whole tier, which coincidentally also can be found on the turns it uses calm mind.
As for Darks, Ting Lu is the only dark that can reliable answer it over the course of a game. Others tend to be unable to break a terastilized Espathra in time, barring Pao who needs band to do so. Grimmsnarl is relegated to very specific teams and is not remotely splashable as a check to it.
If Espathra reaches top ten? In what? Usage? You know pokemon aren't deemed broken or problematic because they hit a certain usage threshold. It's also a bold claim to make that tera dark is gonna be this super popular thing even in a post Pao meta, because there's no reason it would be so popular. Psyspam is a decently popular playstyle because it has pretty good consistency, but that doesn't mean it's dominant or super scary. And calling it more deadly than shed tail was... Is kind of really silly.
One shed tail isn’t as bad than when we had cyclizar. If espathra is a problem then perhaps looking at shed tail would be the next step right?
I assumed you were referring to the cyclizar meta. That's my bad.
However the only pokemon overly enabled by Orthworm's shed tail is Espathra. So how you come to "Espathra is a problem so ban shed tail" is just weird.
Well tbh, arguing about espathra and orthworm is just wasting my time typing since you have made some snarky comments thus far. You believe shed tail isn’t the problem/broken with orthworm as it was cyclizar and you want espathra gone regardless. So we will leave it at that. Thanks.
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