I'm the kind of player you'd call 'the best' :P.
In all seriousness, I don't see what discussion is promoted by this topic. I mean there are of course instances where you can goof around and use stuff you normally wouldn't use, but competitively there is always the 'spike' attitude. In tournaments you wouldn't just use whatever rags / favorites you can think of an expect to get far. Even when using favorites there is a tendency to promote the winning approach. Everyone is a spike to a certain degree.
This is what I was getting at last night in my previous post, but was too tired to articulate it to my satisfaction.
Heres the deal:
JohnnySpike is the kind of player to strive to be in this game as far as being competitive goes. Why?
Timmy-
Hes got this stigma against anything other than teams centered around massive damage dealing. He will never mess with Stall, and might even often find himself losing to it often or always. He comes off as a bit of a noob player. Not diverse in his selection of pokemon or in his making of teams once you get past some of his favorites pokemon's novelty value. He may be the most fun person to play with casually, but when thrown into a competitive environment of sink or swim he is up a creek w/o a paddle because he refuses to adapt his playstyle and will not deviate from his favorite hard hitters of the tier he is in.
Johnny-
Johnny is a bit better off than Timmy. Timmy will use the Smogon set cookie cutter sweeper while Johnny will net himself the element of surprise. That is the part of Johnny everyone should strive for, being creative with your spread/ sets. Just because Smogon says that a pokemons best set is "x", it does not take into considereation what a person may need it to do/ counter for the team.
Great Johnnys are out there. Jak3 was the first impressive UU Johnny that I ever met. He uses some uncommon pokes in ways that fit his playstyle (he loves Substitute) and was #2 in UU the last time I checked. However, Jak3 doesn't make a team that doesn't take into consideration the metagame in which he plays. He has counters to top threats and prepares to face status quo teams (making him a JohnnySpike). You have to make sure a team functions in that meta or no matter how ornate a team is, it will fail to be effective. This is a problem that many Johnnys and Timmys have competitivly in that they both will make their teams without much regard as to what everyone else is doing. If a Johnny makes an intricate team that HAS to use a certain set of pokemon, then he will. He will sacrifice countering threats to potentially get off some combo that may not even be consistant.
Spike-
Pure spikes are not much better than either of the others tbh. Spikes may steal teams from RMT's, or they will just simply copy and paste the top threats from the StratDex. Thats not really the best aproach either. While bog standard works for some pokemon that have a specific role on any team, often times solid teams are the ones that were made by players who take time to seperate their pokemon from the pack(JohnnySpike again). That doesn't mean reinvinting the wheel, but slight changes to a pokemons standard StratDex set can dramitically affect what that pokemon does. Spike loses because his strategies are overdone. People know how to beat him, because they know what he is using.
Another draw back to Spike is that he doesn't experiment, and by extension doesn't learn that much. He only uses the same pokemon in the same way, and never branches out. This restricts his knowledge of the game to a select group of pokemon. Also, due to lack of experimentation he never learns any new synergies until someone else publishes a successful RMT or he faces a team that impresses him... but by then it is old news (players will look for ways around that paticular combo or synergy). A pure spike is a JohnnySpike with learning to do.
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If you look at all of those you notice something-
All of those styles are bad styles of play in their purest form. You need to have a mixture of these things to be successful competitivly.(spike HAS to be present really)
JohnnySpike is really the ideal mixture of these categories (Timmy isn't really needed because Johnny makes teams that Timmy makes, but he wont restrict himself to offense but they can be interchanged). They play around the meta, but because they do this they SHAPE the meta. They are the top players in the game because they use standard pokemon in a way that is innovative(if ever so slightly). The Johnny in them focuses on synergy and team work, while the spike in them says "I need a counter to so and so" and is constantly trying to patch holes to cover the top threats in the tier while making it as versatile as possible.
This was what I wanted to say, but was too tired to do so. Again, no attacks on people who claim to be only one category and are offended, but chances are you AREN'T just one of these styes. Again, I think JohnnySpike is the ideal player, but you need to at least listen to your inner Spike or you really wont ever get far competitivly.