Hey frens and welcome back to ZU Player of the Week. This project will feature interviews from some of the most prominent personalities in ZU so that we can discover more about their Pokémon and personal lives. I am grateful that I will have the chance to interview so many amazing ZU players and I hope that you enjoy these as much as I do. This week's guest is a ZU moderator and one of the coolest users in the ZU scene...
kay!!
Favourite Pokemon:
(ZU Moderator, ZU Council Member, Global Driver, Voted Best Builder and Best Driver in last year's ZU awards)
Ditto used Transform!
Ditto transformed into Inkay!
*inkayy*
Howdy Kay, how are you?
I'm doing pretty great, how are you?
I'm doing pretty good as well, weather has been a fair bit nicer recently so I've been enjoying that!
To kick things off, would you mind telling the community and I a bit about yourself via a brief introduction?
So for the past 7 years I've almost strictly mained NU, but having come into ZU through some quite dramatic series of events a few years ago I ended up kinda just falling in love with the tier and community and ultimately stuck around. These days with how much the power creep hit NU I mostly just main ZU at this point because it reminds me most of how NU used to be so its quite a comfortable place to be
ayy, someone who has been around probably as long as I have on PS. Also, that makes a whole lot of sense as well, glad you've enjoyed your time in ZU so far
Yeah its been a blast. The meta has been such a cool thing to watch change over since I came out of retirement last ZUPL
Ye the DLC definitely shook things up, and as someone who has played both pre DLC NU and modern day ZU, how similar are the metagames? Often hear the comparison a lot
o when the DLC first hit it was almost exactly like NU, just without whims and escav. Now after all the bans its got some similarities but its quite a bit different. I actually really liked the place the tier was at when the DLC first hit. I wouldn't have minded actually banning less but that was just because I was so used to seeing these mons lol
Oh that's kinda cool actually, I guess that must have meant you found your footing much earlier on in ZU after that big shift(edited)
Are there any specific mons that you'd like to see come back from ZUBL?
Not at all haha. I think the tiers in a great spot
If I had to chose 1 thing tho I'd honestly want to play around with the idea of bringing Vikavolt back but that's neither here nor there.
Turt would be the most realistic thing I think that could come back
oo Vikavolt was pretty cool except I remember literally everyone spamming Webs teams before it got banned haha
Yeah so the only reason I'd want to play around with the idea of it coming back was we banned it because it brought in the broken breakers like haunter and eggy-a so easily
... but then we ended up banning the broken wall breakers so now with less broken breakers to abuse maybe it would be fine?
We still have stuff like specs jynx and other scary breakers so it'd probably still be an issue even just on its own but its fun to think about. its one of my favorite pokemon so I'm very bias haha
Always fun to theorymon and definitely a fair point there since the meta looks a fair bit different now
90% of what I do in zu is just theorymon lol
so fars its paid off in some pretty cool ways
that's always great to hear
I guess that sorta lead me onto my next point, which is the fact that myself and many others would agree that you're one of the best, if not the best, builder in ZU. Why do you think that is, and what are your favourite archetypes/specific mons to build with?
So i'll start with the easy answer of Cramorant being my go to specific mon to build with because I still think people largely under value just how annoying it can be to play vs while also patching up a lot of weak points in builder. Makes balance (my preferred play style in zu seeing as stalls kinda hard to pull off right now) so much easier to do.
as for why i'm considered the best builder I'd honestly say its a mix of a lot of things. But one aspect of it I don't really get to talk much about is really just the community reach. I don't just keep to myself when building and like to keep an eye out for what other people are liking/thinking about and it really gives me a better view point of the big picture and to find faults with where my personal building is by getting other opinions I wouldn't even think about otherwise
I also learned from some of the best NU players way back in the days of XY/oras so just having really amazing players to learn from + years of experience and practice really just pays off
Cramorant is definitely an interesting Pokemon, it sorta "fell of a bit" when Rotom was initially spammed a lot, but I do remember that your teams continued to use Cramorant and now it's back on the rise
cram did the same thing in nu before the DLCs of people forgetting about it and thinking its bad and then a good player (eternally) spamming it and then it reminding people its never bad and always good lol
it was funny to see that cycle again play out in zu
lmao that's pretty amusing
also that's some really good (and very modest) insight into the history of your building experience, thanks for sharing
Hopefully we'll get to see you on a team for ZUPL again this year where you'll be once again carrying teams with your teams haha :D
I'm going to be signing up for sure lol
sad I couldn't take my team to the finals last year but hopefully this year we can get a bit farther
I'm definitely looking forward to it as well
Are there any lesser used Pokemon/more gimmicky sets that you've been building around recently that you're willing to share?
yeah so I've actually been spamming semi-terrain with extender thwacky.
(water)While not the most insane thing in the world, its a pretty different take on terrain as its mostly just abusing the fact that
252 Atk Sawk Earthquake vs. 252 HP / 80+ Def Garbodor in Grassy Terrain: 104-124 (28.5 - 34%) -- 98.8% chance to 4HKO after Grassy Terrain recovery -1 252 Atk Sawk Earthquake vs. 252 HP / 156+ Def Qwilfish in Grassy Terrain: 64-76 (19.1 - 22.7%) -- possible 9HKO after Black Sludge recovery and Grassy Terrain recovery
wow that does like nothing
Your BO cores just become unkillable and you can prep with solid win conditions with grassy seed win conditions
I personally think its the strongest variant of terrain you can run and the ways you can build it are so numerous
its virtually impossible to prep for
but as for the really weird stuff, both of these teams I build for dani's ssnl finals and shedinja was by far the thing I was most excited about
I think the mons lowkey good
ah no wonder they were so recognisable lmao, these teams look really cool
yeah I had a blast building them lol
I really like both these teams, Shedinja is definitely one of the most odd Pokemon out there so it's great to see that getting some love
yeah so funny story on that
so I had a totally different mon in mind with that slot but dani wanted to prep for sub NP rotom-frost so I had to totally go back and revamp the team to prep for it and I hard hit a wall when trying to cover everything on top of rotom-frost and in a frustrating moment I gave a not serious look at shedinja (I was that desperate) and I was like "wait this actually totally fits" because it covered stuff like non toxic klinklang, SP cremie, jynx, sub NP frost-tom, and so many other random stuff like basc, flapple, and CB perr
I was kinda amazed at how well a mon I wasn't seriously looking at worked here and so I said fuck it and it ended up working really well lol
Im glad dani had enough faith to bring it
(he brought it twice and it went 1-1)
haha that's brilliant, a bit of a shame that it ended up losing the last game of the second series. That being said it looked pretty solid overall, and ought to get some more experimentation
although I guess one of its best attributes is probably the surprise factor as you wont want teams prepping for it
pretty much haha. but I don't think we'll get to the point where random stuff starts running toxic just for this
its always just going to be a really niche mon
ye that's fair enough
moving away from Pokemon now, could you tell us a bit about what you and any hobbies that you have
so I'm actually pretty boring guy in real life (covid also didn't help with putting a pause on life) but hobbies wise I've always been hugely into competitive games with things like being a diamond~ mid laner in league of legends or always being really competitively good at card games like yu-gi-oh. Mons kinda just fits into the over-all picture of just loving competitive games in general
hit plat in overwatch before I decided the game wasn't for me lol
That makes sense, all of those are fun games for sure, and I also had that same feeling with overwatch haha
Do you listen to music often? Are there any artists or bands that you particularly enjoy listening to?
oh i'm literally always listening to music I'd say my favorite band is unleash the archers but I recently started falling in love with a band called nothing but thieves
(apex and amsterdam being my favorite songs by them respectively)
royal blood gets a shout out too
nice
i dont know much about these bands but i'll definitely have a look at their music after this interview since it's always interesting to find out what people listen to
I love music so just as a note of people wanna send me music always feel free
I'm always on the hunt for good music
that's awesome
Do you have any favourite movies or tv shows?
honestly anything with buster keaton or charlie chaplin
I'm a huge fan of visual comedy in films and I think those two were the peak of visually comedy story telling
kinda like the three stooges but in a more nuanced way
ah the silent film era
it's always funny to watch how the comedy used to be a lot more about facial expressions or lack of it at times but that's incredibly interesting
so I think the best place to start would be a video called "buster keaton - the art of the gag" by every frame a painting
its what really started me on the path to loving this art form
that's great thank you
no problem lol
This question took me a while to think of
Imagine that you're one of those fictional private detectives, like Sherlock Holmes. Every Sherlock Holmes needs a Dr. Watson by their side; who do you think would be best suited for such a role to assist you in your investigations and why?
greybaum for sure lmao
I already treat him like that
haha
That was a very quick response
yeah ever since last ZUPL he's been my right hand man in thinking of just crazy shit and he doesn't get enough credit for the birth of ID klang
he's where I got the idea from
He may have actually used that in NFE beforehand loool
that's pretty cool to see that it managed to also work so well in ZU though
yeah lmao. He told me it was a set in NFE and I was like
"wait doesn't that just break the tier"
so I started spamming it for all 3 of our SS ZU slots
and the rest is history
lmao that's great to hear
Would you like to shout out anybody or give some final remarks?
yeah on top of Greybaum shout outs to daniYSB for having faith in my builds all the way up to finals and getting all the way to game 6 from it
the community at large for being awesome
and yeah just about it. I'm really looking forward to the next tier shift as I think that's really going to drastically change the meta so it'll be fun to work through that
going to be a fun next couple of months
thanks for taking the time for the interview!
no problem, thank you for taking the time to answer these questions
my pleasure
Feel free to ask to kay any questions you want!
