i like this thread. commenting on some of the games that didn't get any
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/vgc2016-309948378
I almost made a full comeback on this but Id like to know how I couldve played this better.
i don't play VGC, but i'd also like to say that maybe next time you should say which player you are so i don't have to skip to the end to find out. D:
the fake out play on inner focus crobat was probably one of your first mistakes, and one that you will naturally fix as you learn more about common pokemon in your metagame. you also should probably be running enough speed to outspeed at least 110s at +2 with xern. if you had knocked off gengar instead of trying to fake out crobat + were a faster xern variant, you'd be in a fine position since you'd kill gengar + dmg bat with dazzling gleam, or at the worst kill just gengar and chunk bat with icicle crash from weavile.
weavile also should not be neutral speed (and nor should thundurus, if you are). there is almost never a scenario where adamant or modest is worth using over +speed natures - speed is inherently the most important stat in the game because it determines whether or not you actually get an opportunity to attack. i would rather do 10% less damage than 100% less damage.
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/pokecommunity-ou-203030
Anti murdering me for anyone else who wants to chime in xD
first thing i notice on team preview is that your team gets annihilated by hoopa, especially if it's the "right" hoopa set. i dunno if that's why you'll lose, but that's the very first thing i notice. you also are going to struggle against clef especially if zong gets weakened, but i'm also fairly sure clef can PP stall gyros so it might not even need to be.
on your end, a cm slowbro does well if you can whittle hoopa / weaken rotom. even cm clef can't keep up with it thanks to psyshock, so if you have cm bro that's your win condition. sd gliscor also puts in work and helps whittle the same mons you want weakened.
you
have to know turn 2 that lopunny has scrappy, so it would have OHKOed with HJK you if you stayed in. even if you made the hard hard read of predicting him to predict you going to slowbro, his best switch-ins (clefable, rotom-w in order of preference for this scenario) dislike eating a knock off more than wisp. it's not a major deal because catching rotom-w with wisp would've been nice, but if you're going to make the read then you need to make sure you're making the most effective play.
tspiking turn 8 and getting rocks up earlier were good plays because anti weirdly has no hazard control on a team with talonbird, and because tspikes limits hoopa's effectiveness against your team. good job getting them set early.
i disagree with the turn 18 double, because clefable is threatening against you and your answers are not great. if you're SD gliscor, i don't know why you wouldn't stay in and swords dance there since his revealed moveset at that point was moonblast / flamethrower / twave (and he -has- to have recovery unless he's a dolt, which he isn't). worst case scenario, you can knock off rotom-w as it comes in to set up for slowbro to ultimately win you the game. worst WORST case scenario is that you aren't SD gliscor, but i think staying in to eq or sd was the right play 100% of the time no matter what set you are.
sacking zong to hyperspace was fine, but you did not need to sack msab. even if he was not choice-locked into hyperspace (which i'm fairly sure he is), standard clef will always live a non-boosting item gunk shot and could moonblast. gliscor lives anything and can just eq (it might even outspeed if you're a fast variant). losing msab is no longer that important in this matchup especially since it ate a moonblast, but it was unnecessary.
no reason to go glisc into tentacruel because all you did there was get more damage on tenta. you know the full clef set now, so you shouldn't be worried by it. you also ultimately ended up eating a hydro to knock rotom off anyway, so i think it would have been ok to play around with it a little more.
rapid spin on chomp and all of the subsequent plays sealed the game against you. while i understand that guessing SD chomp on his team comes with a bit more experience, rapid spinning on that play gave you minimal benefits at best while scalding gave you a decent shot at winning if you predicted no eq. calm minding with slowbro in the face of a +2 LO chomp also seems like not so good of an idea. you also should have sacked tentacruel, gone back to slowbro, then switched to garchomp in that order to preserve the chance of winning with CM slowbro (which was actually fairly good with hoopa dead and chomp gone).
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/pokecommunity-ou-202801
Loss against R.F.
I feel like I could've won this battle if I had played a bit differently, don't want to make the same mistakes anymore :/
Can I get a little bit of input on that battle as well? Because I know I made a ton of stupid plays.
aw man i have no idea who is who (guessing therf = the r.f.?). i guess i'll commentate both perspectives without knowing.
team preview: therf's mega gardevoir is very very threatening. if it's focus blast, it eats every hit from everything on bidoof ftw's team and ohkos in return. it also outspeeds tran / rotom / bisharp / pre-mega gallade and ohkoes all but sdef tran (but i assume that it is not sdef tran from the build). i also doubt that it's chople because bidoof ftw has a good zard-y check in latias and another good torn-i check in rotom-w.
if bidoof ftw's gallade has ice punch, it is also quite threatening but less so because it needs to be wary about intimidates and rough skin + rocky helmet damage. gallade + bisharp, if played well, can win together because bidoof ftw has fairly good answers to the checks of both pokemon.
therf has no good reason not to lead mega gardevoir unless it's some silly wisp set that lacks focus blast. i dunno what bidoof should lead, but it should be able to at least damage mega gardevoir so he can last through it.
disagree with keldeo lead on therf's end. latias is always a good switch-in, whereas there's 0 good switchins for garde.
dunno how i feel about the rotom-w switch from doofer. it gets 2hkoed by specs secret sword, so you don't really gain anything from it other than risking getting chunked and being forced into lati anyway. i also don't feel positively about the double into jirachi unless it's rocks, because the best you get out of that play if you guess right is a uturn into heatran and maybe breaking a balloon that probably doesn't exist. i suppose it does mean you get up rocks with chomp or lando, but this scenario is an example of how it didn't work out.
leaving rotom-w in to eat a draco meteor is kinda, uh, interesting. you have the opportunity to go heatran to get SR, but you lose a good pokemon in this matchup. i could understand fear of EQ latios, but you've also burned it and gardevoir can have focus blast to OHKO heatran anyway.
i think doofer
had to play aggressive several turns later with latias-keld. if you don't double out of latias, therf just gets a free switch-in to gardevoir (immune to dm, resists psyshock) and gets a kill. and if the kill it gets is lati, suddenly you're in a very bad hole against keldeo because you no longer have reasonable switch-ins to it and are now on a timer every time it comes in. you also still have garde to worry about.
and that's kinda exactly what happened a couple of turns after. i think, though, that therf should have just clicked secret sword:
252 SpA Choice Specs Keldeo Secret Sword vs. 0 HP / 0 Def Gallade: 147-174 (53 - 62.8%) -- guaranteed 2HKO
it does less after gallade mega evolves, but you do still have chomp / lando / scarf jirachi to handle that while you probably just want this keldeo or whatever he wants to sack -gone-. it also technically risked the speed tie since you got a low second roll - if bidoof ftw won the tie, it would have been a somewhat sour spot to be in (but i don't think bidoof ftw wins outright because of that).
from there it was mostly straightforward plays; therf could just play it safe and be fine, although idk if going straight to landorus on heatran was better than bringing in keldeo first. even if it died, you can keep lando at full which can live an ice punch from a -1 gallade even w/ no bulk and it outspeeds heatran, leaving you a clean win.
bidoof ftw could have still played out of that hole. specifically, you could double out of tran back into gallade (because jirachi is faster than tran, tran would have the intimidate instead of lando). from there, you have to make a strong play predicting whether he will sack keldeo / switch into jirachi or if he will stay in with landog. it's hard, but you have the potential to figure it out.
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/po...nity-ou-204298
beat zek in the tourney. p sure i could have made better plays
weird teams. more of an interesting weird than a bad weird, but reuniclus in particular seems out of place, especially on a team that doesn't really handle something like mega scizor well already. i like mew + kyub + a bunch of offense checks, that's pretty neat.
you played fine until you swords danced on alt. i think my personal play would have been to stay in and secret sword the outgoing lando-t, but your play was fine as well - and it gave you "new" information in that it is indeed a scarf lando thanks to switch order. i guess the only thing i think about swords dancing is that if you expected their lando to come back out, +1 stone edge still doesn't do that much to opposing landorus, so you'd probably benefit more from flat switching at that point.
you do technically risk getting outsped and ohkoed with vacuum wave against your bisharp (turn 11) if it's a silly np frog set, but i don't disagree with any plays you made so far.
i think your opponent simply could not overcome mew with support (though i kinda question the choice of blizzard on lo kyu-b...) and you were aware of that and played fine. ..oh you're hone claws. anyway, you just can play safe and realize that mew beats everything left "except" cm reuniclus and you win. i don't think i'd have made any other different plays.
Bleh, any thoughts on this one? I feel like our teams were pretty well matched in terms of counters/checks, but maybe not? Feels like this could have gone much better haha.
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/ou-326308479
Warning: turn 3 through 12 is nothing but Jirachi Iron Head spammage :P
i wanted to comment on this one as well.
lopunny does well, and heatran / rotom are important. most important of all, though, is azu in this match b/c it's your one true breaker that can beat everything. wishtect umbreon is annoying to try to handle with lop because protects force you to take 50% with HJK, so you want to make sure you have azu to play rough into it.
also, your opponent's team has two eeveelutions so you can reasonably expect them to not have any real consistency or quality building. it is probably copy-pasted sets from smogon. it is also worth trying to identify the mega right away: scizor / latias / and alakazam are all potential megas, but latias-mega is fairly unappealing for inexperienced players so you could safely make the assumption that it is not that.
i'm gonna kinda overlook the first turn or so because i don't really know why your opponent would switch an obviously defensive lando-t out of an intimidated lopunny. i can't fathom a guess, and that probably means you shouldn't really rely on your opponent to make "obviously correct" plays in the future as well.
the first play i want to comment on is switching jirachi into umbreon. umbreon carries foul play, and foul play does a buttload to jirachi (as you find out a few turns later). i think that bringing in jirachi here was pretty eh when you have azumarill available; that's ultimately what you end up going for, except jirachi has about 65% hp less than it would've if you made the azu switch right away. the only difference it makes is that your opponent cannot identify whether it's band or belly drum azu, since full health umb can live a play rough from drum azu but not band (and umbreon was fairly weakened, so it was in range to be OHKOed by either variant).
i think your opponent was silly to throw away umbreon right away when foul play did negligible damage to azu and they still have scizor and lando-t, but that's a good break for you and you suddenly don't have to worry about it that much. switching azu out of sylveon was a fairly good idea, but i think the better play was to go straight to heatran. remember that your opponent made a questionable play immediately as this game began and made another questionable play by sacrificing their umbreon for 17% on azumarill, so you can't expect them to suddenly know exactly what you're doing and go for a specs HP ground on the "obvious" heatran switch. i wouldn't have been worried about dual wishpassers on this team; not only is specs more immediately threatening, but dual wishpassers would have been silly taking into account team effectiveness.
don't think going to azu on lati was the right play. you know it has to stay in, and you -don't- want to be taking a psyshock because you're going to have to rely on this azu later. this is where having a healthier jirachi would be advantageous. alternatively, you could just stay in with heatran and perhaps get SR up because you shouldn't be too afraid of it getting weakened. heatran doesn't need to be too healthy to check scizor. (i see now that you don't have SR on tran, but even if you're just taunt / storm / solarbeam / filler you should probably stay in with tran).
waterfalling into the lati was a fine play, but i think knock off (if you had it) was probably even better since it covered the potential for your opp to stay in and psyshock, while you still had a couple fair answers to scizor. also your opponent is nuts for having a latias that is slower than landorus-t and heatran, but still somehow takes 65% from landorus u-turn.
no reason to click fake out on turn 26. return gets a kill and covers the potential for a switch. scizor would have died to a return guaranteed, but as a result of using fake out you lose lopunny (even though i think you should have sacked something else, or gone into heatran, or...).
don't get the decision to go jirachi against lando after your u-turn, nor the decision to stone edge into it when adamant u-turn from lando kills max HP scizor at that percent. you're clearly not scarf jirachi (which i thought you were based on the build) and it doesn't do anything against landorus anyway that rotom-w or azu would have done better.
storm miss sealed the deal, but if you still had lopunny + azu you probably would've won that game. i also think that forcing azumarill to take SR damage at the end there only to double into landorus and eat a knock off was kinda silly too. you had a pokemon that died to SR damage, so if you wanted an intimidate or multiple intimidates, you could have gone lando first then switched to a sack. you actually could have just gone lando first and clicked EQ for a comfortable kill, then cleverly used your rotom-w to switch between azu & lando as appropriate to handle the opposing mon.
