What is the best Pokemon in UU?
This is a question that players often ask for several reasons – it’s easy to discuss, you only have to talk about one Pokemon at a time. It’s highly relevant – who doesn’t want to use the best Pokemon! It promises for debates where you can try and prove yourself right. And of course, we always have an obsession with the “best” – we are after all, turning a child’s game into an outright competitive sport.
This post is not going to satisfy any of those natural compulsions. I’d like to use the upcoming viability ranking update as an opportunity to reframe this question with a different but still very valuable aim. Or beyond reframing, I’d like to prioritize another lesser asked question – what is the best Pokemon for this team given the metagame – or simply,
what’s the best here?
Asking what is the best Pokemon is still a valuable question. We can have real debates about our understanding of the metagame. Should you come across someone who believes Blissey is the best Pokemon, you will have little doubt on what they believe the best playstyle is. If you argue for Iron Treads, well that might be a more obvious answer and thus gleans less information, but we still clearly understand you value all the positives Iron Treads brings.
But this is not always a practical question.
Having metagame debates on the forum and posting sweeping metagame claims can be immensely entertaining and enlightening, but metagame knowledge does not easily transfer into teambuilding and playing.
Asking what is the best Pokemon for this team, is necessarily a question of building. Therefore, it is practical.
Consider this example:
Lokix Thundurus volt-turn. Clearly teambuilding is a combination, not a permutation – it doesn’t matter what order you add the elements in, two final products with the same elements will be the same. But let’s say that the first five Pokemon here were Volcanion/Scream Tail/Iron Treads/Thundurus/Gastrodon. What would be the best last Pokemon here?
Different players could give you different, convincing and valid answers. But I submit to you Lokix is a potential answer. It forms a great offensive Volt-Turn core with Thundurus and provides general safety to the team that complements Scream Tails – Scream Tails is a general wall while Lokix is a general revenge killer.
I do not know (well before I posted at least) what Lokix is ranked – or if it is ranked – on the viability rankings. I don’t think it’s possible to make a convincing argument that Lokix is the best Pokemon in the tier. But these questions, are not always relevant in building, what mattered here is what’s best for the team.
A keen objector might say: “But Iron Treads, which you acknowledge is one of the best Pokemon, is a team member here. You just picked the order to put Lokix last – if we put Iron Treads last, the question of what’s the best and what’s the best here are one and the same!”
This is a valid point. After all, nobody is saying we should always use the best Pokemon, if there was one, that would be stale and overly predictable.
Two opposing points still highlight the value of asking “what’s the best here” – first, you recognize the value of the components of your team, all the components. This team described as Lokix-Thundurus volt-turn could also be described as offensive pivots to support Volcanion and Iron Treads as breakers, or at least offensive threats. Neither description is wrong. But by asking “what’s the best here” for each slot, the builder can see the value in each component.
Of course you don’t need to ask semi-philosophical questions to know Lokix can make a volt-turn core.
Consequently, the second point is a new example – take this
balanced semi stall. Now you might say this and the previous team were, not very good. I beg to be given the benefit of the doubt, that these teams are good, although this is not proven, to illustrate the point. There is no Iron Treads here!
Thus, the keen objector from the previous example can no longer say that I simply put Lokix last and ignored Iron Treads – if this balanced semi stall is good and keen objector believes in Iron Treads, they cannot say in this case that what is the best and what is the best here are questions that are one and the same.
An even keener objector might say “Aha – you are still using Skeledirge- and plenty of people could argue that is the best Pokemon. These teams still clearly are using the best Pokemon, particularly as the singular best Pokemon isn’t even clearly defined.”
To which I once again agree.
All I have to say here is (besides the fact that I am a normie who loves to “use the brokens” in the Christo school of Pokemon) – surely you can in good faith envision an optimal team where there are no clearly best Pokemon. It is not farfetched nor even sirfetched to say you can build optimal teams without Skeledirge, Iron Treads, Quaquqval, Arcanine-H, nor Scizor nor some other top ranked Pokemon.
If you disagree, then perhaps the question of “what’s best here” can be used as an indicator – if it always comes back to a small subset of Pokemon, then the metagame might not be in good shape.
But I don’t necessarily believe that to be the case, nor do I think it is soon enough to tell in any case. Valuable as indicators of metagame health are, that’s really not my aim here. The point is asking more direct, relevant and structured questions when building.
This post is clearly less rooted substantively in the metagame – my apologies! – but it’s an encapsulation of dozens of careful discussions I’ve had with excellent UU minds. Sometimes I think the debates on what’s the best are overly self-important (as if this post isn’t!), but I genuinely think people can get more value by focusing on their team, its needs, and the value of its components.
I don’t mind if you think I’m totally wrong or preaching a useless point – feel free to tell me so.