Hello everybody and welcome back to "ZU Player of the Week"!. This project will feature interviews from some of the ZU's greatest community members so that we can discover more about their Pokémon and personal lives. I am thrilled 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. We'll be continuing our new miniseries focussing on the old gens of ZU with the winner of this year's ORAS ZU Cup...
Ditto used Transform!
Ditto transformed into Sableye!
*sableye*
Hey TWiTT, I'm glad to have you here today for player of the week. How are you doing?
Hello Jett! I'm good thank you, just got off a long shift at work so kinda exhausted. How about you?
I'm doing very good, thanks for asking. Hopefully, you can get some well deserved rest afterwards but much appreciated your here to answer some questions.
To get things started, can you tell us a bit about yourself?
Sure! I'm a 25 year old guy from Sweden currently in my fourth year of med school. Even though school takes up a lot of my time, I try and work as much as I can at the hospital as a nurse assistant when I have time off; it is a great learning experience and making some money is never bad. When not occupied with these I tend to spend a lot of time hiking with my girlfriend or just being outdoors in general (although this year I've come to spend a lot more time on here xD)
Wow that's fascinating and really cool that you also work at a hospital. And ye, this past year obviously hasn't been ideal for going outside xD but glad you're having fun on PS instead.
Speaking of PS, how did you first get into it and Smogon?
I've been joining and leaving smogon multiple times for a looong time. The first time I found out about it must have been early DPP before showdown existed when a friend and I tried to look up cool strategies for our in game mons. After that I didn't look more into it until I started getting into competitive which was late DPP, just about when BW came out. I had a youtube channel at the time (that I've deleted long time ago) and was on smogon a lot. Since then I've taken breaks of multiple years but now I've stuck around for about 2 years
Oh that's quite interesting, but for sure glad you've stayed around ZU for a bit now.
I'd also like to congratulate you on your recent win in the ORAS CUP ZU Classic which was a very entertaining run to watch! What initially drew you to ORAS ZU and how's being it like being on the council?
Thank you! Nothing in particular to be fair. Last classic I had more spare time cause of Covid cancelling some stuff at school (Was gonna spend some weeks at the intensive care unit). I had never played any ZU before gen 8 so had to learn from scratch and getting knocked R1 in SM meant I focused on ORAS. Which I later fell in love with.
Being on the council is cool but I must be the worst council member ever due to inactivity. I think we're gonna be working on another VR revamp soon though.
You mentioned that you later fell in love with ORAS ZU, what about it do you like so much? What is your favourite Pokemon in the current ORAS ZU metagame to use?
Oh I personally find it really balanced, people keep complaining about how broken spike stack is but I've been enjoying building everything from Stall to HO. Since it never really was the current gen it's also still to this day very underexplored which I enjoy a lot cause I've always been a fan of coming up with cool gimmicks.
Favourite mon's a bit difficult but I think it has got to be Carbink, can compress so many defensive roles into one mon (and still go offensive when needed).
Ah that's really great to hear; gimmicks are always awesome to see. Also good choice with Carbink!
I'm intrigued to hear your takes on what Pokemon are under/overrated in ORAS ZU at the moment? Would you be willing to share some of your opinions from your experiences.
Hmm that's a good question. I honestly feel like people have a pretty fair picture of what's good and what's not. I don't really know what's overrated but I do think that Swalot and Whiscash are both heavily underrated. Swalot as an amazing glue or wall depending on what your need (that very importantly absorbs T-spikes!) and whiscash using it's amazing typing to perform both as a sub toxic set but also the specs set we used to see in early SWSH.
Oo, that sounds very interesting and both sound like a lot of fun to use
You may be aware that ZUPL is right around the corner; will you be signing up and are you excited to watch/play some more ORAS and other old gen ZU games (I believe you play some of the other old gens)?
Additionally any player you think we should look out for?
Oh yeah I'm well aware, I followed it all last year and it was a blast. Still unsure if I'm gonna sign up because of time constraints (leaving for a trip for the second half of august and school starting up again). If I do signup it would probably be as support since I really don't consider myself good enough to fit on a starting lineup either. Oh I really hope Drud joins, been a blast watching him pick up every tier he's been playing, from current gen to all the old ones. Other than that I hope 5gen and Fruits both play ORAS in this cause they're probably the best around and they tend to bring cool and solid teams
I'm sure you're good enough to start but it's fair that you have concerns about being busy. Very good recommendations for players to watch as well; will be great to watch.
Aside from ORAS, are there any other gens that you enjoy playing, which ones and why?
I do enjoy most of the old gens bar BW. Not really that big of a fan of current ZU but that's probaly because I haven't kept up with the metagame for almost a year. Favourite outside of ORAS is probably ADV cause once again it's a very undiscovered tier and you can bring a lot of fun stuff that has a niche like Teddiursa and Larvitar. I like SM a lot too though
Ah the cool LC mons being viable sounds like a blast.
SM also is very fun, id have to agree.
Focusing the questions more on you now rather than mons; I like the way your username looks, how did you come up with it?
It's really random lol. When I came back to mons about 2 years ago I couldn't remember what my username I used to use was since it had been a few years. I decided to hop on PU cause that's all I had really played for the last decade lol (or since it came out whenever that was). I just wanted some HO to play quick games and decided to build some terrible webs team that I altered over and over again. Just make my username WTTT, Webs to the top and then for some reason I added another t to make it TWTTT and then eventually it became twitt cause that's what some friends at the time read it as.
oh lmao, pretty funny story but I guess it worked out pretty well in the end
Outside of playing mons, what other hobbies do you have?
I really like hiking, something Sweden offers great opportunities to do. I also really enjoy cooking and going for a run!
oh wow that sounds great, what's the longest you've hiked for, and do you have any interesting stories about what you've seen while hiking?
So far the longest was bout 10 days and about 20-25 km's a day so about 200 km. Interesting and the worst memory was when we ran out of gas and was 2 and a half days away from civilization where we could buy more, did not enjoy trying to eat the dry food uncooked...
oh damn that's quite long and that doesn't sound pleasant at all rip :(
You also mentioned you liked cooking, what's your favourite food to make? Any special recipes
Oh I'm a sucker for italian food. Lately been trying to pull of some nice sour dough pizza but still working on the perfect recipe, I'll get back to you when I find it
sounds yummy, and haha that sounds great!!
Yeah you can never go wrong with pizza
The next question is very hypothetical as I'm sure we won't have the technology to do this any time soon; if you could pick a Pokemon to have as a pet, which one would you choose and why?
Oh god. No idea haha. Chansey? IRL nurse Joy ish?
Oo, that's pretty smart and fits with the fact you study medicine haha, Chansey could introduce some groundbreaking stuff to that field
Penultimate question, do you have a team?
I guess I could share this one!
It's the first ORAS team I've ever built with only some EV spreads changed along the way. The team is designed to slowly chip down your opponents team with fat mons and rocky helmets and whenever you get the chance, just go specs Magmar which claims kills vs a lot of teams right now. Carbink set might look weird but it's a way of compressing rocks while still beating toxic Regigigas and in general working as a late game wincon.
Both Toto (who I do like all my testing with) and I used it for multiple games this tour to some decent success. Kinda poor speed control and struggles vs some special breakers and stalls that can deal with Magmar but I like it quite a lot. I hope he won't hate me for sharing it D:
Thanks for sharing this team, also im sure toto wont mind since the team doesnt have regigigas since he'll probably want those ones hidden haha.
To wrap up this interview, do you have any final remarks or shoutouts you'd like to make?
Thank you so much for having me, absolutely love what you're doing! Been so much fun getting to know more about a lot of people that you chat with from time to time! Btw, getting back to the ZUPL stuff, will we see you in ZUPL? :smile:
Shoutout to Toto , thanks for being one of the nicest guys on here and thanks for not getting fed up with me asking to test all the time T.T
Yes hopefully I get drafted
And no worries, you've been an excellent guest, and thanks for taking some time to do the interview :>
Feel free to ask to TWiTT any questions you want!
