Pokemon

Intro

The time has come for me to unburden myself, to walk down my dark past and reveal to you all the deep secrets I keep, to teach you as well the beautiful and delicate dance of war so that you too may appreciate the eternal quest for glory. I know a little bit too much about competitive Pokemon. Just a little bit. Someone on Mastodon asked me to elaborate. Time for me to share that cursed knowledge with you!

Here's my personal history of playing Pokemon as seen through some memorable stories. This is probably incomplete and I reserve the right to come back and add things later. Also this is a first draft, so it's probably a bit patchy.

Background to Competitive

Before we get into the stories, I thought I'd give a little background. This section deals with the history and nature of competitive Pokemon, while the following details the specific mechanics within.

Pokemon is many things, as benefits one of the largest media franchises on the planet. There's games, tv shows, more games, movies, even more games, toys of all kinds, so many games, theme parks, etc. But all of that started with a classic game, Pokemon Red and Blue (or Red and Green or Green and Blue because the translations were weird and changed the names). This game, a take on a JRPG where you caught mons to make a team to take into battle, set the formula that defined the Pokemon game as a concept. Because of that, we can divide all Pokemon games into two branches: mainline games, which follow the RPG formula tightly, particularly with respect to the battle system, and spinoff games, which do all kinds of things from pinball to action games to roguelikes.

You may note that that Red and Blue is actually two games. This is part of a long tradition of Pokemon releasing two versions of each game, with slight differences, such as different Pokemon available, different areas or story, and typically a different legendary available as part of the story. Some people complain this is money grubbing, but honestly I kinda liked it as a kid, as it encouraged trading and working with others.

The mainline games are often identified as a "gen", like "gen 5". A new gen has begun when the games are no longer able to directly connect to previous games and challenge them. Typically, this is because new Pokemon have been added which the older game doesn't know about. These games are pretty formulaic (kid gets a Pokemon from a trio of three and travels a region, pursued by a rival, beats 8 gym leaders to earn a badge, defeats the evil machinations of some cartoonish bad guys which often tie into the ancient legends of a godlike Pokemon which the player can catch, and then finishes by challenging the Elite 4 and Champion, the final boss). What unites them is their battle system, which has remained relatively intact since that first generation (the only major change came with the physical/special split in gen 4, which I'll talk about later). While individual mons, moves and abilities have been rebalanced or had their niche interactions changed, overall the broad picture of a battle has remained incredibly fixed.

The battle system is the fixation of competitive Pokemon. It drops off every other aspect of the games (exploration, training, catching, the story and characters, etc) to focus purely on winning battles. Battling other people has been a feature right from the start, from link cables to ds wireless to modern internet based matchmaking. Challenging your friends is only natural and once people are challenging each other, it's inevitable some are going to seek out the best strategies.

The AI in the games is pretty bad and it's not hard to abuse certain mechanics or grinding to trivialize a lot of the fights. As well, the games have been trending easier, although how much of that is the games being easier and how much is the audience getting smarter is unclear. Because of that, fighting other humans is a completely different and rewarding experience, requiring strategy and tactics far beyond anything employed in the base game.

But there's a big problem. The optimal strategy was still grinding.

Without getting too much into the weeds, Pokemon stats are randomized. But that means that anyone who doesn't spend a bunch of time rolling until they get one with maxxed stats is at a disadvantage. And so, creating a legal competitively viable team could take up to a dozen hours of grinding. If you realized after a couple matches that you needed to change one thing in the team, that could be hours more. They've taken steps to fix this in later gens by adding ways to increase stats, but it was like this really through to gen 6-7. It sucked.

Naturally, people want an easier way to make and test teams. Also they want to play other people online easier. And so, in the Game Boy days, they invented simulators.

In the beginning, there were a bunch of them. Now, there's really only one: Pokemon Showdown. Showdown is actually like four different things at this point. It's an open source recreation of the battle system as implemented in cartridges, as accurate as they could make it with (there are teams of people who create niche setups to test out mechanics and whole arguments on if bugs should be replicated). It's a tool that can take a given Pokemon or "set" and check if it could be legally made. It's a server framework using the above two systems to create a ladder with matchmaking anyone can join. And finally, it's the specific server I linked above, which is the largest running server and the one most people mean when they say Showdown, even though anyone could run their own and there are a few smaller ones (mostly for modding or tournaments).

Showdown breaks the game into distinct "ladders", where each ladder has a different set of rules and legal Pokemon. The first division is by gen. You can play with the specific battle mechanics and mons of any of the 9 gens. The second major split is by power level. There are over 1000 Pokemon. Most are not very good. To create an environment where anyone can use their favourites, Showdown has multiple tiers of power. From strongest to weakest, they go Anything Goes, Ubers, OverUsed (OU), UnderUsed (UU), RarelyUsed (RU), NeverUsed (NU), ??? (PU). As such, you can play gen 7 OU, gen 4 ubers, gen 8 AG, etc. As well, there's double battles (have two mons out at the same time), four way multi battles (added in the greatest April fools prank of all time), and a bunch of other game modes with weirder rules, like monotype (can only use one type of Pokemon) or ones that outright add new mechanics (anyone can mega evolve! Pokemon can use any move that starts with the same letter as their name! etc).

Showdown is incredible, both as a piece of open source software and as a rebellion against large company control of games. It's independent from the Pokemon company and questionably legal. They don't make any money and hope that suffices. At this point, if Pokemon did go after it, their entire competitive scene would turn on them, as most of the people who attend their official tournaments on console are using Showdown to practice. It's completely free to use and focuses on just trying to build a good place to be. As well, there's Smogon, a forum and community attached to Showdown, who are kind of the experts on competitive Pokemon. In particular, they handle all the "tiering" (deciding which Pokemon goes in which tier), which makes Smogon one of the largest freely available sources of thinkpieces on metagames and balancing philosophy. You can learn a lot of really interesting thoughts on running ladders by reading Smogon threads and that kind of rocks. While most of the tiering is determined automatically from usage rates (anything with a high enough use rate in OU can't be used in UU and so on), the councils also ban things that are usage legal but too good and try to make other decisions for the health of the ladder. I could probably write an entire blog post just about tiering philosophy, but this is mostly about actually playing so I'll try not to go too deep into the weeds.

I spent an ungodly amount of time on Showdown and only really stopped when gen 9 meant that most of the gen 7 ladders disappeared (they only run ladders that are popular enough). I never played gens 8 or 9 as I don't own a Switch, so I never got into their competitive scenes. But I know an ungodly amount about gen 7, and quite a lot about 4-6. I'm far from the best, but I'm pretty good, frequently pushing into one of the top players on gen 7 randbats when I'm taking it seriously (random battles uses randomly generated teams each match). All of that naturally has led me to certain behaviours I didn't realize weren't normal until recently (memorizing the type chart, instantly knowing what a given Pokemon is running when I look at it, very good at damage guessing). My knowledge cuts off after gen 7 because I don't own a switch, so I haven't played 8 and 9 on console and I always feel weird playing competitive for a gen I haven't played. As such, those modern mechanics will mostly be absent from this rant.

The Anatomy of A Pokemon

Let's take some time to talk about how Pokemon actually works!

Pokemon is a game of exceptions. It has around a thousand different Pokemon, a thousand different moves, hundreds of unique abilities, and hundreds of items, all of which can be combined in millions of ways. Obviously, I can't list them all. Rather, I'm going to take a moment to walk through the basics and common mechanics. Please assume that anytime I make a sweeping statement (like: there's no way to ___), I'm tacking on an extra "except for this one niche case".

Broad picture overview: each player enters with a team of six Pokemon. Each picks one to start the fight with. Players can either choose to use one of the moves of their active Pokemon or switch to a different Pokemon from their team. Moves mostly do damage, but also include buffs, debuffs, and stranger effects. If a Pokemon runs out of hp due to damage, it faints and cannot be used anymore. The winner is the first person to faint all of their opponent's Pokemon. The most common modification to this is a double battle, which works the same but you can have two Pokemon out at once and choose which opponent to target with each attack. That's it! Knock out all of your opponent's Pokemon before yours get knocked out. Nice and simple.

Pokemon is turn based, but in a slightly atypical way. Both players choose their moves simultaneously. The moves are then executed in an order based on the speed of each Pokemon. This means that a fast Pokemon always gets to attack first, so a common strategy is for a fast mon to knock out its opponent before its opponent can attack, thus denying the opponent that turn. This is called "sweeping" and the endgoal for most teams is to set up a sweeper. But what is a Pokemon, anyway?

There are over 1000 Pokemon these days. Each is defined by a combination of things. These include a fun name, a cool design, lore, catching conditions, evolution methods, and a bunch of other junk. Thankfully, competitive simplifies anything that isn't directly battle related. For our purposes, each Pokemon has six stats, four moves, one ability, and one held item. Nothing more. The combination of a species plus a specific value for all of these is called a "set". Your team is therefore made up of six sets.

Let's talk through each of those values.

Stats

There are six stats: hp, attack, defence, special attack, special defence, and speed. Hp works exactly how you think it does. Run out and faint. Every damaging move is divided into one of two kinds: physical and special. When you use a physical attack, your attack and your opponent's defence are used to calculate damage. When you use a special attack, special attack and defence are used instead. Otherwise, they both work the exact same way. Speed determines who goes first when attacking, although switching always goes before attacks and some moves have "priority", a mechanic that makes them always go first unless your opponent is also using priority.

While each stat has a final number that is used in battle, that number is actually calculated from three different values.

Each species of Pokemon has a list of "base stats", which are the same for all members of that species. This means that all pikachus are kind of fast, all dragonites are strong, etc. Typically, this varies a lot but 500-600 Base Stat Total (BST) is a pretty common range for OU mons, distributed across the stats in varying amounts. Some mons have really divergent stats, with high attack and speed but no defences, while others have very well distributed ones. Usually, specializing is more useful and some combinations are more useful than others. A mon with high attack and special attack isn't likely to be great as most sets specialize into either physical or special.

The next value in final stat calculation is "Individual Values" (IVs). These are used in the games to randomize a mons stats and are a random number between 0 and 31. This is one of the reasons competitive teams were so hard to assemble: there is no reason not to use a mon that has 31 in all stats, but that means rolling mons until you find one that does. Later games added ways to raise them which mostly fixed this problem, but this was instrumental in motivating simulators prior to that. Since every mon has a 31 here in all six stats, thankfully we don't have to worry about this when determining stats (there is an exception here, which is that some mons run a move called hidden power, which determines its type based on the IVs of the mon).

Finally, we have "Effort Values" (EVs). Each stat can have between 0 and 252 and the player can distribute 508 points into them however they want. The games obscure how this distribution works because it's kind of complex, but we use simulators so we don't have to worry about it! This is the custom part of the stats for us. In most cases, it'll be 252 in two stats and 4 in another, but some sets do run more complex variations. Generally, if it's an attacking mon, it'll have speed and one attack stat (this is why you don't see mixed attackers [mons with both physical and special] very often). If it's defensive, it'll have hp and one defence. If it's a slow attacker, it'll be attack and hp. There's a couple of weird niche cases (stall lugia runs speed and hp), but it's not worth worrying about those.

There's one final complication, which is nature. All Pokemon get a nature, which boosts one stat by 10% (not hp) at the cost of decreasing another by 10% (also not hp). This is usually where you'll see the most variance. Sweepers which always run speed + attack will usually have speed nature variants for outrunning and attack nature variants for that 10% extra damage depending on the needs of the team.

Moves

Each Pokemon can have four moves, selected from its movepool. The movepool is fixed depending on the species. In the games, this is super complicate, as mons can learn moves from level up, TMs, HMs, tutors, and egg moves which reqiure specific ancestry. Further, movepools have changed with games as new moves were added, TM distribution was changed, egg lists were shifted and so on. Thankfully, the simulator handles this for us, giving each mon a fixed list of moves it can pick from depending on its species. This means that every Pikachu can pick four moves from the exact same list as any other Pikachu. Movepool is probably the most important factor in determining if a mon is good.

Each damaging move has a power, an accuracy, a type, a possible secondary effect, and is either physical or special.

Power determines how much damage it does, in concert with your stats. To give you a rule of thumb, a ~40 power move will have a really useful ability (ex: always going first), a ~90 power move is going to be very consistent with a minor secondary (ex: 10% chance to burn), a ~120 power move will have a major drawback (ex: 70% accuracy [focus blast more like focus miss]), and a ~150 power move is usually the highest you'll see and has a major drawback (ex: low accuracy and massively debuffs yours stats, costs you your next turn, can't be used twice in a row, is only given to like one mon that's kinda bad). Generally, the power works linearly. 80 power will do twice as much damage as 40 power, depending on relevant stats. There are a dozen other factors effecting damages, including abilities, weather, screens, etc. If you want an example of how complicated this can get, the damage calculator gives you a pretty good idea. Look at at all those buttons! Wild!

Something important to keep in mind about the balancing is that everything works in concert. Some moves seem broken because they're only given to mons with low stats (cough cough boomburst which has 180 power and no drawbacks but is hindered by being only given to otherwise meh mons). Some mons have god tier stats but an ability that actively makes them worse or no good moves.

All moves are either physical or special. Interestingly, it didn't use to work like this. The biggest shake up to battle mechanics was the the physical/special split in gen 4. Prior to that, the physical/specialness of a move was decided by the type of the move, meaning all fire moves were special even if it was called fire punch and sounded like it should be physical. This made some mons really useless (for example, hitmonchan was supposed to be about using elemental punches, but they all keyed off its weak special attack stat). Now, each move has its own assigned physical special which makes things a lot deeper and better.

All moves have a type. All Pokemon have one or two types as well, depending on the species. Using a move that matches the type of your mon conveys a 50% damage boost, called Same Type Attack Bonus (STAB). I think this is a dumb name and never call it that. As well, there's a type chart which shows how each type interacts. When attacking, you compare the type of the move to the type of the defending mon. Lining up super effective moves for double damage is super important and makes typing really important to consider when picking mons. Offensive mons need good "coverage", which means having lots of useful types of damaging in their movepool. Types like normal are bad because they're not super effective against anything. What coverage is considered good is meta dependant because you want to be able to hit threats in the meta, but usually fairy, ice, fire, ground, electric and fighting are some of the most useful. The four move limit becomes huge here when a mon can't run all of its useful attacking moves, meaning it can get hardwalled by a defensive mon it can't hit for effective damage. This in turn can become a deception when you try to bluff moves you don't have. Defensive mons need to have good defensive typing, meaning they resist a lot of moves. For example, scizor is bug and steel, which is great defensive typing. It resists a lot of things and is only weak to fire (although it's a double weakness four 4x damage).

There are also status moves, which buff or debuff. Each stat can be increased or decreased up to 6 times. These are often referred to as +-X (ex: +2, -1, +4) which refer to how many times the stat has been increased or decreased. Stat changes clear when you switch, another reason switching is important. Because opponents can always switch, debuffing as a primary strategy isn't very common but is often a nice bonus. Instead, you usually see sweepers buffing themselves. Some of the most common buffs are: swords dance (+2 attack) [abbreviated SD], dragon dance (+1 attack, +1 speed) [abbreviated DD], calm mind (+1 special attack, +1 special defence), and quiver dance (+1 special attack, +1 special defence, +1 speed). Each +1 represents a 50% increase, so swords dance instantly doubles your attack, often letting you oneshot anything in front of you. Boosting speed is also important so you can't be counter attacked. Sweepers are often made or broken on access to good buffing moves.

There are also other utility moves. While there's a whole bunch with super specific and weird niche effects, the two types you'll see a lot are status moves and healing moves. Healing moves are pretty obvious. Mostly, they just heal you for 50% hp. Very common on defensive mons and utility mons, as ways to gain hp are limited (unlike in the games, you can't use potions in battle). Status moves inflict statuses, which are divided into "volatile" and "non-volatile". Non-volatile statuses are really common because they persist through switching. There are five: burn (halves your attack and does 6% damage each turn), poison (depending on source, either 12% damage each turn or a value that starts at 6% but increases by 6% each turn the mon is active), paralysis (chance of missing your turn plus half speed, the chance and level of speed drop has changed several times over the gens), sleep (can't move for usually 1-3 turns), and freeze (in theory like longer sleep, in practice just can't act for the rest of the battle. Notably, there are no consistent ways to freeze. I think the highest chance for it is as a 10% bonus on an attacking move, so there aren't any strategies around it).

There are also the volatile statuses, which is mostly just confusion (chance of hurting self instead of attacking), which does clear on switching and isn't super common.

Burn is really useful for rending physical attackers useless and often inflicted via will o wisp (85% chance to burn, does no damage). Poison (the scaling version) is used to hard shut down stall mons as the increasing damage will always eventually outpace healing. It's often inflicted via toxic (90% chance to poison, does no damage). This means that poison immunity (through poison or steel typing usuallY) takes something from good wall to incredible wall. Paralysis is really bad for sweepers because it slows them down and is often inflicted by thunder wave (90% chance to paralyze, does no damage). These three are the common ones and are used on all kinds of utility mons.

Sleep can't be dealt consistently and often reduced battles to chance because of it. It was limited for a while with sleep clause, which prevented you from sleeping multiple opponents at once and sos was mostly used by niche gimmicks until recently. Earlier this year, a couple abusers finally figured out how to work around sleep clause and could basically render every battle a coinflip (if sleep lands, they win. If not, the opponent wins). Because of this, sleep was actually banned from modern gens, a decision I'm still reeling from.

Another important class of status moves is entry hazards, like stealth rocks or spikes. These do damage every time an opponent switches. As switching is so common at high level play (often featuring consecutive turns of no attacks and just switching), these are also really common, along with moves like defog that clear entry hazards.

There's a bunch more, like moves that set weather, defensive barricades, clear non-volative statuses, force an opponent to switch, let you attack and switch at the same time, and so on. Seriously, we'd be here all day if I tried to list them all and all their specific mechanics and all the ones that behaved weirdly. Take my word for it.

Ability

All species of Pokemon have 1-3 abilities, which each mon can choose from. These have all kinds of effects. Some are really common (intimidate, which gives an opponent -1 attack when you switch in and is available to like two dozen mons). Some are only on one singular mon and have a super specific mechanic (multitype is only held by arceus and lets it change its type when given specific held items). Most increase a mon in some minor way. Some have major changes on the way the game is played, like immunity to types or categories of moves or status conditions. Some reflect status conditions.

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Some actively make a mon worse when GameFreak thinks a mon is too powerful. There are two mons like this, Slaking and Regigigas, which both have god tier stats and an ability so bad they'll never see competitive play (slaking only gets to attack once every other turn and regi has halved attack and speed for the first five turns its out, resetting on switch).

Abilities are so specific that there isn't really more to say here. Sometimes they make a set. Sometimes a mon is good enough that it tolerates a useless ability. There's no good general approach here but looking up abilities for each mon when you see it until you have them all memorized.

Item

There are a fucking billion items and each mon can have one. Thankfully, there are only a handful of good competative items, so barring niche shit, you only need to know a few common standouts:

There are others of course with as many diverse effects as moves and abilities, but those are the most common ones by far.

Team Structure

That's the anatomy of a mon. Let's quickly talk through team building. Generally, there are four kinds of team.

Balance teams are the most common and most standard team by far. They have flexibility and consistency. Usually, they'll have a couple of support mons with the ability to inflict statuses and hazards, scout out opponents moves, and heal for survivability. As well, they'll have a sweeper or two they'll try and maneuver out. Other common roles for a mon here are pivot (good at switching in and out quickly to gain advantage), revenge killer (very fast mon tuned to kill a sweeper mid-sweep often using a choice scarf to outrun even buffed sweepers), wallbreaker (something with a lot of firepower to punch through stall), and cleaner (similar to sweeper and revenge killer but tuned to hit teams that are already full of holes).

Hyper offence throws out all of the parts of that equation that deal with being slow and focus on dishing out as much damage as possible as quickly as possible. They usually open with a suicide lead (shuts out opponents lead, plants statuses, and then usually explodes to get out of the way of the actual attackers), and then have all sweepers and revenge killers. They're kind of terrifying and take guts to play. While normal matches go ~20-30 turns, hyper offence matches sometimes hit under 10. If Pokemon was fencing, these are the sabrists to balance teams foil and stall's epee.

Stall is the weird one and its near and dear to my heart because I'm a stall player by nature. Stall is pretty rare, mostly because everyone hates it. Instead of trying to deal damage via attacks, stall deals damage passively, by planting status conditions and hazards and then just waiting. Every mon on stall is a wall capable of healing, blocking, or dodging. It's frustrating to deal with but really fun to play. People often accuse it of being no skill, but it really takes as much skill as any other team and that's just the usual "oh you beat me so your method doesn't count". To be honest, I could write an entire blog post just about stall in games.

Finally, we have gimmick teams which take advantage of niche mechanics to create weird setups, like mons that are in theory immune to damage, mons that shoot up to +6 in all stats instantly, etc. I tend to look on them with a little bit of derision because generally, these don't work. This is for two reasons. One is that they often require several turns of setup, during which your opponent will often just punch you out. They're often theorycrafted to an insane degree to block out normal damage but miss other common mechanics. Status condition damage bypasses damage immunity, forcing a switch clears status conditions, hazards often block them out entirely, etc. They're predictable and that makes them easily counterable to a team with options. The other reason they don't work is that if they did, they'd be banned. Duh. Nobody likes playing the game where there's an unbeatable set, as we'll soon see.

For the most part, regardless of which team you're using, the flow of the battle is pretty simple: identify what mon on your team can win easiest (probably the sweeper), identify which mon on the opponent's team can stop it from doing that (probably the revenge killer), and then attempt to bait that mon out by making it look like you're putting the sweeper in so you can kill it, allowing you to actually sweep. This leads to a lot of switching around, grappling for position, and generally trying to predict your opponents moves so you can hit them for good damage. If you can call a switch, you can use a move targeting the mon coming in giving you a huge lead. But your opponent can read that and not switch, giving the advantage back to them. It's really complicated and has a lot of layers and is honestly the best part of battling. While some battles are predetermined in the teambuilder, a well designed team can handle anything and has odds of winning any fight if you stick to your guns and wait for the right moment to strike. I love this game so much. It's so good.

Conclusion

Honestly, that's probably enough basics to get you building simple teams. Here's some useful resources if you want to learn more:

And with that, lets talk about some of my favourite sets, mons, and weird moments.

Several Fun Pokemon Stories

So now we know what makes up a mon and the basics of battling. Now it's time for me to tell you about some of my favourite sets and moments. Anything I say should be assumed to be only true to gen 7 metagames unless I say otherwise. My real expertise is gen 7 ubers (my best ladder), followed closely by gen 7 randbats and I think that shows in the sets I find interesting.

Mega Rayquaza

In the beginning (like gen 5 or so), there were the standard tiers: Ubers, OverUsed (OU), UnderUsed (UU), RarelyUsed (RU), NeverUsed (NU), ??? (PU). This was fine and this was good.

And then GameFreak added Mega Rayquaza in the second half of gen 6.

Rayqauza, for context, is a legendary dragon introduced in gen 3. Being a box legendary (main focus of a game), its an ubers mon banned from OU and lower tiers. It has okay speed, high attack, and dragon/flying type. Dragon and flying type is pretty good defensively, only having a few weakness (fairy, rock, dragon, and a double weakness to ice). Dragon type is incredible offensively, so good that GameFreak added fairy typing in gen 6 specifically to check offensive dragon sweepers using outrage (fairy is immune to dragon). For coverage, outrage, the staple 120 power physical dragon attack is as good here as ever, despite fairy types slowing it down a little. Our boy ray also gets earthquake, a very consistent 100 power ground move, and extreme speed, a move with 80 power and double priority (like priority but also beats priority). Extreme speed is really good and mostly balanced by being only on a few things. It also gets v-create for more coverage, a 180 power fire type move that debuffs the user's speed and defences. Oh, and rayquaza gets both sword dance and dragon dance, meaning it can choose between oneshotting everything or moving at the speed of light.

All this is to say that rayquaza was pretty good. Good stats, good coverage, and good movepool, while not unusual for ubers, still comes out very strong.

But mega-rayquaza...

Oof. When a mon megas, its BST goes up, taking rayquaza's already high 150 base attack to a jaw dropping 180, as well as pumping it from a meh-in-ubers 95 base speed to a decent 115, as well as minor defence increases. When a mon megas, its ability usually changes and rayquaza is no exception, going from the forgettable air lock (cancels weather on switch in) to the new and broken delta stream (no longer weak to types that would be super effective on flying). This makes it an unstoppable attack god that's now really hard to hit back.

Still not super out of line for ubers, the tier for godlike mons, right? Right? Hey, remember what I said before about having to hold a mega stone to mega evolve? Unlike every other mega, Mega Raquaza, does not need a stone to evolve. Instead, it has to use the move Dragon Ascent, which coincidentally is a 120 power physical flying move, filling the flying type physical damage hole that previously existed in Rayquaza's movepool. Did I mention that flying is really good coverage and dragon/flying/ground basically hits everything for at least neutral? This means that on top of going mega, it can hold an item. On top of the mega buffs, on top of the damage resist, on top of everything, it can pick up life orb bonus damage. Or it can run a choice band and punch through defensive checks expecting to switch while it sets up. Or it can run a scarf and just outrun everything from go. Or it can run a lum berry to counter anyone who thinks they've being clever by burning it. And there's no way for an opponent to know which one you're running without trying a counter and seeing if it works.

If the counter is the wrong one, mega ray will then just sweep you, of course.

It was so incredibly broken, the ladder collapsed. It was so good every team was either all about abusing it or countering it. This sucked. They wanted to ban it, but that provoked an existential question. Ubers was supposed to be the catch-all tier for banned mons, collecting anything that was banned from OU, the stable and standard ladder. What do you with something too good for the god zone?

You create a brand new tier called Anything Goes (AG), of course, defined by having one specific mon permitted compared to ubers.

AG eventually did collect a few other things that have been kind of questionable over the years. Rules which normally limited battle, such as sleep clause were disabled here, opening the door for a few other sets. AG was a chaotic and strange place, full of the gimmick sets that got banned from other tiers and many mega rayquaza's. I say was, because they recently retired it! I don't have all the details because it was a gen 9 thing, but my understanding is that GameFreak managed to add a mon so incredibly broken that it made mega-ray look balanced, and it led to them finally retiring the tier entirely. Fun!

Mega ray is a great example set because no specific thing made it broken (although you could argue mega+item did). It just had good everything and the ability to run multiple good sets, a theme we'll be looking at several times here.

Funbro

Change of pace! Mega ray was fast, so let's talk about something slow. Slowbro, to be specific.

Slowbro is kind of a silly guy. His thing is that he's slow, which is often played for joke in the anime and games. Also, there's something about his tail being a delicacy which is a discussion we don't have time for (and is honestly kind of tame compared to some of the really cursed lore anyway). It has high defensive stats, a really useful ability in regenerator (heals 33% every time it switches), reliable recovery via slack off (heal 50%), okay coverage, a mega that has decent statboosts, and the ability to set up with calm mind. Generally, it's sat in UU or OU (depending on the gen) as a fairly consistent wall or slow setup mon.

This set is not that. This set is something else entirely.

I didn't talk about it earlier because it comes up pretty rarely, but all moves have a PP value. This is the maximum number of times each move can be used in battle. Each move has a specific max pp and each mon tracks each of its moves separately. Really powerful moves get 8, standard moves get 16, and weaker moves can go as high as 48. In basically any match that doesn't feature a stall team, this will not come up as it won't last long enough. Even with stall, running out of pp is only really ever a determining factor in stall vs stall (where running the opponent out of heal bell/aromatherapy [removes status conditions from whole team] is usually the singular goal for both sides). When a move runs out of pp, it can't be used anymore. When a mon runs out of pp for all its moves, it can't attack anymore. If it tries to attack, it will use a move called "struggle", which cannot be used any other way. Struggle has changed a lot over the gens, but eventually standardized to dealing a small amount of damage, having no type, and dealing 25% of your max hp as recoil damage on each use. This prevents infinite battles.

Sidebar: technically, any battle can go infinite by having both parties just continually switch which doesn't drain pp. People aren't worried about this because like, either side could just stop switching and attack. The two longest battles I've ever played were ~650 and ~920 turns and relied on switch spam for most of that. The 650 turn was a hilarious stall v stall that attracted a bunch of spectators from lobby and I was totally going to win until my computer crashed (we were slipping one attack in every 10 turns or so and my opponent was going to run out of healing before I did based on the pp math). The 900 turn one was really stupid because I spent ~750 turns doing nothing but switching, partially to lull my opponent into a false sense of security and partially to to be a dick. I finally won when they seemingly assumed I'd keep going for another 80 turns (Showdown forces a tie at turn 1000 to save on server costs) and forgot that I did have the capability to ko their backbone if I lined up my one remaining attack pp with it.

So how do you build funbro?

Item: leppa berry (restores 10 pp to first move to run out)

Moves: block (opponent cannot switch until you faint or switch), slack off (restores 50% hp), and recycle (restores consumed single use held item)

Ability and stats: irrelevant

Do you see it?

Switch in on a defensive mon that can't buff. Block to prevent it from switching. Spam slack off to prevent yourself from dying. Leppa berry restores your pp when you run out and recycle restores the leppa berry, giving you infinite pp. So you just stall till your opponent runs out of pp and then they die from the recoil, right?

Wrong. I forgot to tell you the fourth move. Heal pulse, which heals 50% to the opponent (intended for use on an ally during double battles). See, if one mon dies, your opponent could bring in another you'd have to deal with. Who wants to handle that? Just heal them up. Heal pulsing every other turn blocks out struggle completely and recycle gives you infinite pp. The battle can last forever. Literally. You have to follow a very simple algorithm. Your opponent just has to press a single button. The winner will be whoever has more patience to sit and press buttons.

As you can imagine, this got banned pretty quickly. But the interesting question is how. See, as I mentioned before, slowbro was an OU/UU staple depending on gen. They couldn't ban slowbro. And all of the moves used here have uses on other legitimate sets (if sometimes questionable sets). Just ban the combination, right? Every time they tried that, someone found a more ridiculous sequence for creating infinite battles. These ranged from starting the leppa berry on a different mon and shifting it around with item swapping moves, skipping recycle via other methods of berry recovering. My personal favourite and the one that absolutely broke any attempt to come up with a concise rule for detecting infinite battle sets abused leech seed, a very common move that continuously drains hp once used. Not your leech seed, to be clear, but your opponents. By switching a high hp mon like blissey into leech seed and then blocking, you didn't need to heal the opponent at all as the leech seed would outpace the struggle damage completely.

Honestly, I feel like there's a documentary in the history of endless battle clause. The current version, which is pretty consistent, is kinda complicated and hard to describe, but (roughly) it ends the battle if one mon has no options, has healed, and the other mon started the match with the means to recover pp. It then grants the win to the mon with no options. This is pretty good but requires the set to actually execute the full pp drain, meaning you can still use it to render any one mon incapable of attacking by prolonging the battle by like 50 turns. It also confuses people who expect it to kick in a lot earlier than it does.

My favourite fun fact here is that if you open up the Showdown code and look at endless battle clause, you can see that in a four way battle, it will never trigger. The comments justify this by pointing out it's basically impossible to detect in four way battles, but as far as I can tell this isn't super documented anywhere and most people don't know this. I don't know how you'd abuse it because there isn't an infinite battle method that scales to work on three opponents at once, but you can really be a dick once two people are dead and it's a 1v1 if you want.

Wobbuffet Lock

This is a funny short bug story. Wobbuffet is a gimmick mon which resembles a punching bag. It has no moves that do damage directly but plenty of moves that reflect it (ex: dealing 1.5 times the amount of damage it just took). It also has an ability, shadow tag, which prevents opponents from switching. Overall, it's pretty niche and not that useful.

Except something funny happens if two wobbuffets go up against each other. Neither can switch. And neither can do any damage, because all its attacks rely on the opponent doing damage first. So both players have to sit there for ~150 turns (all of wobbuffets moves have high pp) until they run out. This ruined a few tournaments in gen 3 when wobbuffet was introduced, so gen 4 patched it so that shadow tag doesn't trap mons that also have shadow tag. This amuses me greatly (and sometimes I wish they'd left it in).

PP Stall Gothitelle

While we're talking about pp and trapping, let's talk about a case where it's actually useful and not banned.

Gardevoir looks kind of like a woman and is therefore the number one mon that people want to fuck. Its followed by closely by mega lopunny, which combines a bunny girl vibe with actually looking like its wearing lingerie. No idea what they were thinking with that one. Gothitelle is a gen 5 mon that is basically just gardevoir but goth. It has a very similar statline, kinda similar appearance (but goth), and functions the same way in battle (until gardevoir got a mega in gen 6). My personal conspiracy theory is that gardevoir and gothitelle are the some Pokemon, just going through a goth phase. That's not super relevant, but I find it funny.

Gothitelle does have one thing gardevoir doesn't, though. It has shadow tag. Yeah, wobbuffet' trapping ability. Shadow tag, while rare, is banned from OU and below because it's a basically uncounterable shut down to any kind of defensive mons. Gothitelle doesn't really work in ubers due to having terrible stats and moved compared to the titans therein, but another shadow tag user, mega gengar, does see plenty of use as an offensive trapper. Switch in on defensive mon, setup, ko it, switch out. This is such a threat that some defensive sets in ubers run shed shell (item which grants immunity to trapping) specifically to counter this, even though there's only one pokemon that's actually abusing it.

But the fact that gothitelle doesn't have the stats to work in ubers didn't stop people from trying. See, it can maybe trap and ko a single support mon, but mega gengar does that better. It could trap and try and setup, but it can't speedboost, so it can't sweep. So what do you do?

Hey, remember what I said earlier about how nobody uses stat debuffs because your opponent can just switch to clear them? What if your opponent CAN'T switch?

Enter pp stall gothitelle, a set that ties you down and drains your pp until you're completely helpless. Equip a leftovers for that extra recovery and then use taunt (opponent can't use non attacks for three turns), rest (fully heals but sleeps self for 2 turns), charm (-2 attack to opponent), and confide (-1 special attack to opponent). Switch in on something that can't ko you outright. Use taunt to block their ability to worm out with buffs or support tricks. Drop their attacking stats and use rest to keep yourself alive. Sit on them until they have no pp left for everything and self ko via recoil.

This set is hated by many people, mostly because once it enters, it grinds the battle to a complete halt for 50-100 turns while it picks up a free kill. Despite this, its never been banned from ubers because honestly, it isn't that good. It's incredibly predictable. The instant you see a gothitelle on your opponent's team, you know exactly what it's going to do and that makes it easy to play around. Gothitelle's weak stats are a huge liability and a lot of uber's best threats can just kill it before it gets enough debuffs off. Further, switching it in costs a lot of momentum, especially if your opponent is ready for you and using their support mons as bait (if they switch out to something that counters on the turn you switch it in, they get a free turn of setup while you have to pivot away). It only works on limited mons and is therefore useless against some teams. Because of this, using pp stall gothitelle is in many cases like playing a mon down. But you still see it occasionally on the low ladder and in my opinion, it's always funny.

FEAR Rattata

Focus sash Endeavour quick Attack Rattata (FEARattata) is the real archetypical gimmick mon, the first one you learn about on the playground as a kid (at least, you did when I was a kid. no idea if kids still swap this one). It's the perfect example of a gimmick, really.

Pokemon in the games have a level. In competitive, every mon is level 100 (the max) because there's no reason not to be. This rattata is level 1. Despite that, it can technically still get kills. The build is pretty simple. Focus sash means that it cannot be one shot and that whatever hits it will leave it with 1 hp. Endeavour is a move that sets the opponents hp equal to your own. Quick attack always goes first because it has priority.

So, turn 1: opponent attacks you down to 1 hp, you endeavour them down to 1 hp as well

Then, turn 2: quick attack for the ko (minimum damage is not technically 1, but you have to be actively trying to do 0 damage and 1 is the effective minimum for all practical purposes)

Unbeatable, right? It's the archetypical gimmick because it's perfectly designed to handle mons that do damage and fails the instant the opponent tries any other tactics. Entry hazards break it instantly by denying the sash condition (it requires full hp), status conditions and weather can help bypass the sash, any opposing priority beats out quick attack, ghost types hard wall it, etc. And because its a level 1 rattata, your opponent knows exactly what it's doing and almost certainly has a counter because all of these things are common on teams.

You don't see this guy above the low ladder or sometimes in clickbaity Youtube videos with titles like "Legendary Spammer Cries Salty Tears". I hate those videos because they're manipulative. Having been on a lot of high ladders, you don't see this kind of thing on the high ladder because it just doesn't work. The videos don't show you the likely dozens of times it lost to get the one win and often outright misframe their videos (I've caught at least one guy claiming to be playing in ubers but using a build that's only legal in anything goes).

Swagplay

What's the other direction for gimmicks to go? Well, what if a gimmick works?

Klefki. The gen 6 key pokemon. Often cited as an example of poor design in later gens because it's literally just a keyring, to which I counter that gen 1 has a mon that's literally just a fucking snake whose english name is "ekans" (read it backwards).

It's a steel/fairy type, which is a really interesting combination with a lot of good resistances. As well, it has prankster as an ability, which is really good for support mons (prankster grants +1 priority to all non-damaging moves, meaning it always goes first when not attacking). Its support movepool is decent, having entry hazards, classic debuff thunderwave, useful defensive buffs of both screens (reflect and light screen which double your whole teams defence and special defence respectively for five turns). It does notably lack healing, which is a major limiting factor.

But what if we give it swagger, a move which doubles the opponents attack and confuses them? Doubling their attack doubles the confusion damage, of course, but also means you're likely taking double damage too. But that's not too bad if you add in foul play, a move which uses the opponent's attack stat in damage calculation. Throw on an always goes first substitute (lose 25% hp but fully block next hit) and you can just spam sub until your opponent takes confusion damage, using the gap to foul play.

This is essentially pure randomness given flesh. There's no consistent counter. There's no good options. If it rolls well, it will shut your entire team down. If it doesn't, you can beat it. The essence of Smogon's tiering philosophy is that randomness is good but matches should usually go to the more skilled player. A set like this which reduces the match to a coin flip quickly became the dominant strategy and that sucked for everyone.

So they banned swagger. That's the thing about gimmick sets. If they worked, they'd get banned.

But that's not the end of the story, because you know where it wasn't banned? Anything goes. You know what else isn't banned in anything goes that is elsewhere? Evasion.

See, there's a secret 7th stat that's fixed at 100% for all mons but can be changed in battle via certain moves. It modifies the accuracy of all moves. At max evasion, mons dodge like 2/3s of the attacks thrown at them and it's been banned since time immemorial because it fucking sucks. But it is legal in anything goes (read: ANYTHING goes), which drives swagplay up the wall. Replace thunder wave with double team (+2 evasion) and it becomes a mostly unstoppable god of destruction. Of course, anything goes is full of unstoppable gods of destruction, so it mostly balances out.

And that's how a fairly meh UU mon became one of the staple threats in anything goes for a while.

Perish Trap Gengar

Hey, we haven't had a trap set for a little! Remember when I mentioned mega gengar up above as a better gothitelle? Mega gengar has very high speed, good special attack, and very good coverage, with ghost, dark, poison, ice, and fighting moves. Because it can trap opponents, it's often good for jumping on weakened mons or picking off weaker support mons. It has useful utility like taunt, will o wisp, and substitute. This makes it a mainstay in ubers, common on all kinds of teams.

But there's a fun and weird variation on it. See, gengar sometimes struggles to actually pick up kills against more defensive mons or anything that can just counter attack. so what if we went for an instant kill move?

Perish song is a move that, when used, will kill all active mons after 3 turns pass. It can be broken on each side by switching. It's occasionally used to force out defensive mons and sees some mainstay use on hackmons to counter pp stall (a ladder where you can use illegal sets, leading to terrifying and advanced version of the gothitelle set among other things). Or, you can just put gengar in, use perish song, protect (blocks all damage for a turn), substitute (blocks next hit in exchange for 25% hp), and then just switch the turn before you faint. Your opponent can't, of course, so they just faint. You can take out anything this way.

It works shockingly well, especially because gengar has normal sets that see use in ubers, so people aren't surprised to see a gengar on a team. This lets it punch out things that otherwise counter by resisting its attacks. Disadvantages are that it can be played around if your opponent knows you have it, it only works a couple times due to losing hp to sub, and your opponent does get a free swing on the switch turn. Decent set, no complaints.

z-geo Xerneas

This is probably my favourite set in all of competitive pokemon. It's so stupid and it doesn't work but I love it anyway.

Xerneas is one of the most threatening attackers in gen 7 ubers. A pure fairy type, it has good stats, an ability that boosts fairy type damage for free, decent coverage (fairy is one of the best attacking types in ubers because ubers is full of dragons), and a potent unique move, geomancy. Geomancy takes two turns to use and locks you in for the duration, but gives +2 special attack, +2 special defence, and +2 speed. That two turn use time is really bad and would make it a less flexible quiver dance...

Except that there's an item called power herb which once per battle makes a two turn move only take one move, making geomancy the most potent setup move in the game (but only once per battle). Xerneas is an incredibly common lategame sweeper, constantly threatening to clean up once its counters have been ground down.

This also opened the door for other xerneas sets relying on the opponent assuming its a single use sweeper. Choice specs sets can hit hard enough to punch through walls expecting to come in on the setup turn, scarf sets can function as decent revenge killers, and there are even support sets running aromatherapy and using the space a threatening sweeper creates to buy time to heal.

Or you could fuck all that and embrace the two turn setup. See, remember when I said z-moves where like really powerful moves? Like single use 200 power moves? Well, there are also z status moves, which are like really powerful status moves. One of them is z-geomancy which, as well as geomancy's normal effect, boosts every stat by one for a whopping final total of +1 atk, +1 def, +3 spa, +3 spd, +3 spe. It does take two turns though and can only be used once.

The problem with it taking two turns is that you're definitely taking one hit from a counter in that time. Turn 1: you start buffing and claim the +1 all, your opponent switches in their counter. Turn 2: you finish buffing and get the normal geomancy effect, your opponent gets a free hit. Thanks to the defence boost, you can usually survive it if you crank your defence stat. But can you survive the next hit? There's a couple commonly used defensive steel types that can take a hit from xerneas even buffed up and there are also threatening priority attackers in ubers, like arceus normal or marshadow.

Well, you could heal. Xerneas does have healing in the form of rest but using rest puts you to sleep for two turns. That's plenty of time for your opponent to counter in all kinds of ways, most commonly forcing a switch via whirlwind (makes your opponent switch to a random mon) or clearing buffs via haze (resets all stat changes), both of which are common. You can counter whirlwind via ingrain, a move which gives a small amount of passive healing and makes you unable to switch, but now you're at three turns of setup and helpless while you're asleep. That's also all four moves taken (moonblast for a good fairy attack, geomancy, rest, and ingrain).

Moonblast is good enough to work as an only attack, as with the buffs and xerneas's ability, you can even punch through the things that resist it eventually. But three turns of setup is just too many and you're too vulnerable during the sleep turns.

What if you weren't vulnerable during the sleep turns? Xerneas also gets sleep talk, a move which only works if you're asleep and uses one of your other moves, picked randomly. Sleep talk actually can't pick two turn moves, meaning it'll have a 50% chance of moonblasting and a 50% chance of wasting a turn by trying to rest while asleep. This is actually really good as you're now on average only losing one turn to heal, which is on par with normal healing. But no ingrain means you're back to being vulnerable to being forced to switch.

Because of this, as well as still being vulnerable to a lot of the standard xerneas counters, this set languishes as a very rare but fun trick.

Until I came along. Confession time! I once broke a ladder. Here's how.

See, I was thinking about z-geo xern and I came to a realization. Running ingrain is necessary to block being forced to switch and running sleep talk is necessary to keep your offence up, but the four move limit means you can't have both. But there's another way to block forced switches. If there are no other mons on your team, you can't be made to switch. So I did the unthinkable and went onto the ladder with a two mon team. Sleep talk variant z-geo xerneas and a suicide lead deoxys speed (deoxys speed is the best lead in the game, having all of the hazards, all kinds of good utility like taunt, skill swap to force past magic bouncers, and being literally the fastest mon in the entire game. It's commonly used as a suicide lead on hyper offence and it's basically the perfect mon for the job). The d-speed shut out whatever my opponent tried to do, planted hazards to break sashes, and then did whatever it could to make setting xern up easier. Then xern comes out and does its thing.

You see small teams occasionally on the low ladder. It's always gimmick stuff, although its always overconfidence in a gimmick, not a gimmick that literally doesn't work if there are other mons. There's generally no reason to use less than 6 mons unless you're doing something like this.

I got to 1500 on ladder with that team. My threshold for the gen 7 uber ladder was that generally that good players started at 1400ish. Yeah. It was fucked up.

Essentially, it was determined from match selection who won. Either my opponent had a mon that countered it (certain marshadows, some duskmane necrozmas, and magearna) or they didn't. If they didn't, I won. If they did, they won. Getting past 1500 was hard because most teams had something they could do.

That would be where this story ends as an amusing anecdote about the time I got a sort of gimmick team to do okay except that I also once tried to impress a lesbian. By writing a bot that played Pokemon. And I thought: why teach it to play properly when I have a team that follows a very simple algorithm?

So I wrote a bot to run that team on the ladder. 5 matches at once, continuously. I left it running for an hour and had lunch and came back to realize something horrible. See, it hadn't climbed in the rankings the way I had because the algorithm was a little more subtle than I'd thought. But it had been been playing 5 matches at a time against the low ladder. Gen 7 ubers wasn't the biggest ladder. Most players in that zone had been going up against it roughly one in three matches. And while some of them had counters for it, a lot of them didn't and were now either ragequitting on sight while cursing my name or had modified their teams specifically to counter me in ways that made their teams significantly worse.

I broke a ladder! Oops! My bad!

I spent a while tuning a bot for randoms, which several people said was way better than anything a game had ever actually had, although it never did very well. Some day I'm going to come back to it and try making a bot that actually learns instead of trying to hardcode everything. It did impress a lesbian though, so who is the real winner? It's me. I'm the real winner.

Okay, I'm calling it here for draft one with a promise to come back later because this got way longer than I thought and I need to make time for other projects. Tune in next time for things like baton pass chains, why gen 6 uber was the best tier ever and criminally underrated, a lengthy discussion about why typing matters, and an in depth description of the best team I ever built (plus maybe some other stuff if I think of it). Happy battling kids and thank you for reading!

Today's link of the day is Kill Six Billion Demons, probably the best webcomic I've ever read.