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Your Pre-Competitive "Strategy"

In diamond and platinum my strategy was to take my starter and NEVER USE ANY OTHER POKEMON TO BATTLE.
Infernape sweeps hole game, except F-ing Gyarados.
My childhood = infernape getting walled by Gyarados, over, and over, and over again

Oh yeh, then I met Lucario :P
 
Blizzard, Thunder, Fire Blast, Hydro Pump Gyarados. I kid you not. Level 100 Gyarados ended up being walled by Aaron's Vespiquen, of all things.
 
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Coverage and as many different types as possible.
Doesn't matter what the role, as long as every pokemon was a different type and covered something different as well
Since Gym Leaders and the Elite Four pretty much stuck to one type, it would be easy for one pokemon to sweep through each leader
 
I've been playing Pokemon for nearly 15 years and am only JUST now learning about competitive strategy (acckkk). I learned about EVs during Gen 4 and tried training (I'm assuming) a Dratini but got lazy and gave up. I fully EV trained a Dragonite about a year ago on Black 2, but its move set was terrible and the IVs sub-par. I knew about IVs by then, but went with "good enough." I think it was a week or two ago that I learned perfect or near-perfect is not at all unheard of and I'm currently trying my hand at. . . not being an idiot. In the mean time, though. . .

Strategy up until recently has been all-out attack. I wasn't afraid to use status ailments, but anything that helped stats received an automatic "no" from me. I'm inclined to blame the god-awful AI and wild Pokemon constantly using Defense Curl even while I hit them with special attacks. AI doesn't get smart until post-game and I've largely been a play-through type player. For the longest time, the only things I understood were STAB and type effectiveness. Physical vs special, nope. Didn't learn until they switched. Status boosting moves? Literally a week or two ago. Even my Hall of Fame X file has a Raichu with four electric attacks. I at least don't use one OP Pokemon for everything - I learned my lesson after my first Blue playthrough. 80-something Blastoise never stood a chance. I didn't even bring any elixers. I struggled my way through Lance and then the rival killed me.

This has been a long response. Basically, I think I covered every flaw that everyone here has said. I've done it all. I'm a noob who's been playing for 15 years.
 
I remember, when I restarted my beloved pokemon Sapphire, with a Latias that had taken me about a month to catch for... a hydro pump swampert. This was before I knew you could use the Daycare to breed Pokemon you wanted.
I was eight years old.
 
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My Favorite strategies before I became competitive-

1) Hyper beam everything.
2) Just teach the move which has highest power to your pokemon. No need for anything else.
3) Nothing can beat legendaries. Use them
4) Anything else except attacking moves suck, and shouldn't be used
 
For some reason, in silver, I thought Hoppip was the shit, because it knew Synthesis. I'd catch one and grind it to level 10 so it could learn tackle. This was tricky considering it was without an attack. This was usually my team before Gym 2.

Hoppip @ No Item
Trait: N/A
EVs: shit
Nature: cute
Level: 10
- Splash
- Synthesis
- Tackle
- Tail Whip

Hoppip was my idea of a wall. Tail Whip was useless; it's not like it does damage or anything. So is Splash. Tackle was my main attack, almost 9HKOing Bugsy's Scyther after Potion. It's not like it could hurt me. I was invincible with recovery.
 
This is the first generation where I've been paying any real attention to IV's, EV's, and to some extent Natures. It's also rare that I would consider using status moves.

Not that I'm exactly 'competitive' yet...but I'm working at it. Trying to, at least...
 
I've read through this thread... and I have to say that what people are generally listing ("oh i just use high-power moves") is actually the most efficient way to play the Pokemon games (as opposed to metagames). Are people really implying that it is more efficient to beat the games themselves by obsessively training for EVs and running moves like Rapid Spin?
 
noobcubed said:
I've read through this thread... and I have to say that what people are generally listing ("oh i just use high-power moves") is actually the most efficient way to play the Pokemon games (as opposed to metagames). Are people really implying that it is more efficient to beat the games themselves by obsessively training for EVs and running moves like Rapid Spin?
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It's not so much as the fact that all high-powered moves are bad, but in my case, it certainly wasn't good. I was running special moves on something with a SpAtk stat in the 60s, meaning it didn't hit nearly as hard as I thought it would. Aaron's Vespiquen, while weak to three of my moves, managed to tank hits after only a few Defend Orders on her end due to her natural bulk and Gyarados's terrible SpAtk.
 
I had been on a Pokemon hiatus since a little after Platinum came out, just getting back into Pokemon and competitive last fall with X and Y. My first legitimate strategy I used which didn't involve teaching a Pokemon all STAB moves was when I somehow caught wind of Thunder's perfect accuracy in rain back in Pearl, so I taught it and Rain Dance to my Gyarados, mainly because I saw Lance's Gyarados use Thunder in Leafgreen. His other two moves were Surf and Hydro Pump. An all special Gyarados.

However the noobiest thing I ever did was when I got the Master Ball in Ruby back in Third Grade. I saw the description said that it "catches a Pokemon without fail", and I immediately knew what to do with it. I went back to that cave on Dewford to catch the elusive Abra before it could escape me again! Groudon got to eat a Leaf Blade from my level 60 Sceptile.
 
For Doubles:

Metal Sound Magnezone + Special (non-NP) Lucario, along with Toxic Spikes Nidoking, and a Pokemon that I put only to utilize Thunder Wave. I actually wanted to use this competitively until I realized that Steel is weak to Fire (I didn't, at the time) and someone notified me that t.spikes and t-wave on the same team is extremely contradictory.
 
Thunderbolt Gyarados, Magnet Bomb Magnezone, Bullet Seed & Cut Roserade, using all 3 starters in the same team through trading and restarting... ah, the good old days.
 
I used a Charizard with Blast Burn, Fly, Dig and SolarBeam. It was the best thing ever because nothing could resist those moves.
 
FireRed was my first Pokemon game, and I still remember some of the awful things I thought were great:
  • Focus Punch Snorlax. After realizing that Snorlax had a very impressive HP stat, I decided a good strategy was spamming Focus Punch and absorbing hits until I was lucky and the NPC used a status move or something.
  • Metal Claw + Fury Cutter Scizor. I didn't care how bad its movepool was; I thought it just looked awesome (keep in mind this was before Technician came around and made Scizor actually good).
  • Lapras with Surf, Ice Beam, Blizzard, and Sheer Cold. I thought Sheer Cold was literally the coolest move in the world (other than Hyper Beam, another long-time favorite).
  • Right after I re-watched the original Mew vs. Mewtwo Pokemon movie as a 9-year-old, I decided Hyper Beam Gyarados was the right Pokemon for me. It didn't help that the animation for Hyper Beam was one of the coolest in FireRed.
  • Before I had developed enough brain cells to understand type matchups, I hated facing Blue because my 4 STAB Charizard would always lose against Blastoise, and it was the only high-leveled Pokemon on my team. So I devised a strategy to beat it: Explosion Exeggutor. I evolved it immediately after catching it as an Exeggcute, so it didn't really know any other good moves.
  • In a similar vein, my brother's starter was Squirtle, so I tried to get a Pokemon that could beat it. I decided to go with a Jolteon. Still not really understanding type matchups, it didn't have any Electric-type moves, relying on stuff like Sand Attack.
Honestly, I didn't even understand the concept of "coverage" or "STABs" until I happened to stumble upon Smogon analyses. I was kind of dumb.
 
CyclicCompound said:
Before I had developed enough brain cells to understand type matchups, I hated facing Blue because my 4 STAB Charizard would always lose against Blastoise, and it was the only high-leveled Pokemon on my team. So I devised a strategy to beat it: Explosion Exeggutor. I evolved it immediately after catching it as an Exeggcute, so it didn't really know any other good moves.
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How did you even get as far as the champion
 
Kurona said:
How did you even get as far as the champion
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Honestly, I don't know. I beat the Elite Four with the aforementioned Lapras, Charizard, and an Alakazam. I had three other Pokemon with me (a Nidoqueen, a Gengar, and the amazing Explosion Exeggutor), but they didn't end up being used, hahahaha.

Alakazam was truly the MVP—I actually had a usable set on it (Calm Mind with three good attacks).
 
CyclicCompound said:
Honestly, I don't know. I beat the Elite Four with the aforementioned Lapras, Charizard, and an Alakazam. I had three other Pokemon with me (a Nidoqueen, a Gengar, and the amazing Explosion Exeggutor), but they didn't end up being used, hahahaha.

Alakazam was truly the MVP—I actually had a usable set on it (Calm Mind with three good attacks).
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Alakazam makes in game walkthrough's a piece of cake. Seriously with no Dark types and only the occasional Bite to scare Alakazam nothing stops it from being the best in Kanto.
 
True, 65 base attack is absolutely dire -- but so is Alakazam's base 55 HP and base 45 Defence. A STAB Shadow Ball coming off of 65 base attack will probably be enough to kill it.
 
My rules I followed before I knew how to do stuff:
  • ALL WATER TYPES
  • Latios is water type because he's blue
  • If you beat the league 1,000,000 times you get a rare pokemon
  • ONLY USE ATTACK MOVES
  • Muddy Water is best because it looks cool
 
Kurona said:
True, 65 base attack is absolutely dire -- but so is Alakazam's base 55 HP and base 45 Defence. A STAB Shadow Ball coming off of 65 base attack will probably be enough to kill it.
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Alakazam is still faster and kills with Psychic / Psybeam / Confusion whatever you have at that point in the game.
 
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