Reports

Published on November 18th, 2014 | by Amarillo

16

A Journey into the Darkness: A 9-0 Nationals Team Report

Hey everyone! My name is Andy Himes aka Amarillo (pronoiunced ah-mah-ree-oh) and this is my USA Nationals and season report. VGC 2014 was the first season that I’ve had that I can really call a success so I’m finally getting a chance to write a report about a team I’m proud of! I’ve been playing since 2010 and I think 10 is the year I was best at but I never got a chance to prove it because I was unable to attend any events that year. At the beginning of the season I was running a team with Mawile/Garchomp/Hydreigon/Rotom-H/Aegislash/Scrafty and at the time I believed I had the best team because I was number 1 on the Showdown ladder with around a 90% win rate. However, at Regionals everyone I played at both Virginia and St. Louis had 2 or 3 fairies on the team. I knew fairies would get played but I never imagined I would see teams like Mawile/Azumarill/Gardevoir and I had 2 Pokémon with 4x weaknesses. Between my team being awful for the real life, non-Showdown metagame, and a bit of bad luck I ended two straight Regionals with a score of 5-4. Some people may remember me crying in the corner in St. Louis because it seemed like all of my hard work for the last few years just hadn’t paid off. Reflecting on it, I let myself go on tilt and went into the events with a poor mentality that I’ll discuss later in my Guide for Beginners. Regardless, it was then I decided I would just play for fun the rest of the year and I decided I would start using Smeargle. I had used Smeargle to great success in the second season of the NPA and it has never let me down in online tournaments in the four years I’ve played this game. That said, I’ve been too afraid of taking it to a real tournament between the accuracy of Dark Void and it being way too easy to counter. After my depressing Winter Regionals performances I learned that all this time I’ve been playing to not lose instead of to win. At Madison I took a team consisting of Smeargle/Kangaskhan/Rotom-H/Salamence/Azumarill/Amoongus and ended up going 6-2 for a 13^th place finish. Feeling like I had made progress I decided to stick with the team concept and kept working at improving the team.  This is what I came up with after testing various things for around three months and ultimately used at the US National Championships.

Team

Smeargle @ Focus Sash
Ability: Moody
Level: 50
EVs: 252 HP / 4 SpD / 252 Spe
Jolly Nature
– Dark Void
– Transform
– Follow Me
– Spiky Shield

The concept of Smeargle is to NOT spam Dark Void. Let me repeat that: if you are using Smeargle and you are relying on Dark Void then your team is not going to be consistent. Smeargle’s purpose is a scare tactic in team preview. My opponent must lead counters to Smeargle or they probably lose. This gives an opportunity to always get a lead advantage and counter whatever Smeargle counters they have that I can figure out from team preview. If the opposing team looks like it can’t handle it, then I’ll use it. I also never lead Smeargle/Kangaskhan unless the opponent has 1 or 0 Pokémon that outspeed Smeargle. In simple terms, you KO any Smeargle counters and then send it in from the back once they can no longer do anything to stop Dark Void. You can also not bring it at all and just gain a favorable team matchup because the opponent is forced to send out specific Pokémon against you.  A few sentences about the move set: Transform is one of the best moves in the game. It copies the stat boost of what you are transforming into which is why it’s so deadly after a Kangaskhan Power-Up Punch. Not many teams are equipped to handle 2 Mega Kangaskhan. Transform gives Smeargle an offensive presence. Transform is also helpful against certain strategies such as Perish Song. At Regionals in Fort Wayne I was able to transform into my opponent’s Mega Gengar and trap his Azumarill which had used Perish Song. I was also not afraid of being Shadow Balled by his Gengar because I still had my Focus Sash active. Ultimately I won a speed tie against his Mega Gengar and Smeargle-Gengar was able to win the game. I had tested Tailwind, Encore, and Fake Out in my 4^th move slot but decided on just running Protect. Smeargle naturally gets double targeted a lot due to the Focus Sash it’s running and a double target into a Protect when you have Kangaskhan as the teammate is usually game ending. Spiky Shield is a better Protect than King’s Shield because it blocks Taunt of course. A big shout-out goes to R Inanimate for convincing me the night before to use Moody. I was planning on using Own Tempo to prevent Speed drops but Randy just said, “Moody is the play”. Moody ended up winning me 2 battles in swiss outright and helping in a third. Moody also single handedly beat Ray in round 7 which I kind of felt bad about afterwards since I clearly wouldn’t have been able to beat him otherwise that game…

Kangaskhan @ Kangaskhanite
Ability: Scrappy
Level: 50
EVs: 4 HP / 252 Atk / 252 Spe
Adamant Nature
– Return
– Power-Up Punch
– Sucker Punch
– Fake Out

Mega Kangaskhan is the biggest threat. It has Fake Out which you want if you plan on using Dark Void and it abuses Power-Up Punch letting you transform into a +2 version of what is already the biggest threat on the field. Simple and terrifying, Mega Kangaskhan is the best partner that Smeargle has ever had. Not even Kyogre was a better partner. I chose this EV spread because I wanted to outspeed all other Kangaskhan. With a slower Kangaskhan I would not be able to ever bring Smeargle to the battle if the opponent also had a Mega Kangaskhan on the team. I used Jolly for a while and it was okay, but I kept running into speed ties which is the last thing I wanted. I switched to Adamant and never noticed a difference in my speed, except if I Mega Evolved first I was confident I would always attack first which wasn’t true with Jolly max speed which is a tad ironic I think. Fake Out is chosen over Protect to help out Smeargle. I also really enjoy having two Fake Out users on the team.

Rotom-Heat @ Life Orb
Ability: Levitate
Level: 50
EVs: 164 HP / 252 SpA / 92 Spe
Modest Nature
– Overheat
– Thunderbolt
– Hidden Power [Ice]
– Protect

Disturb not the Harmony of Fire, Ice, or Lightning…or else Rotom will turn you to ash… I figured out very quickly that Kangaskhan is weak to Steel types so I decided I needed an aggressive Fire type. Rotom-H seemed like the best Fire type that fit my plan. Of course my team so far was weak to Garchomp. I then got an idea: why should I bother using Will-O-Wisp when I can just KO everything with Hidden Power Ice instead? This is where my idea of running a Life Orb set came from. The EV spread is simple and admittedly inefficient. Max Special Attack Modest gets the greatest damage output. I thought I might as well do as much damage as I could since I’m sacrificing Hit Points to do so. 92 Speed EVs hits 118 Speed. This was an arbitrary number that made me feel safe that I out-creeped all Rotom-W. Of course, this is slower than Bisharp which I didn’t even consider when I was building the team and then ultimately lost to on Day 2. If you want to run LO Rotom-H yourself, make sure you go to 132 EVs to outspeed Bisharp. The rest of my EVs were dumped into HP because there was not anything specific I cared to calculate for. The last thing I wanted to mention was that for Nationals, Will-O-Wisp was terrible. I know a bunch of people had success with it this season and I’m in the minority that thinks it was a really bad move this year, but I want to explain my thought process anyway. Rotom is probably slower than everything you want to WoW. That means it is taking a hit before firing off an 85 accuracy attack that isn’t going to get an opposing Pokémon off the field. In the case of Kangaskhan, burning it doesn’t remove its pressure. It still has Power-Up Punch and enough power on its own that it could still possibly run you over. Garchomp has Lum Berry often enough that Wisping it isn’t viable either. Mawile you should just be attacking with Overheat anyway. I was also terrified of players running Facade Kangaskhan in a field such as Nationals which just makes you lose instantly as much as the community jokes about it. In fact, I ran into a Facade Kang user at 7-0 so my judgment for running a statusless Rotom in the end was correct.

Salamence @ Haban Berry
Ability: Intimidate
Level: 50
EVs: 4 HP / 252 SpA / 252 Spe
Modest Nature
– Draco Meteor
– Flamethrower
– Dragon Pulse
– Protect

I like Intimidate and needed as much Garchomp hate as I could possibly have because LumChomp is the best Smeargle counter — and it really isn’t close either. Against the very common Kangaskhan/Garchomp lead I would lead my Salamence and Scrafty while leaving Smeargle on the bench. I had been using Choice Scarf for a long time, but found that getting locked into Draco Meteor — especially if it missed — made me lose almost immediately. I switched to Haban Berry a week before Nationals because I was tired of Scarf’s inconsistency and never once regretted it during the tournament. Choice Specs Hydreigon still OHKOs Salamence through Haban Bery but since I ran max Speed, I always outsped the common Modest Specs Hydreigon anyway. Dragon Pulse was selected as a 100% accurate move that doesn’t lower my Special Attack. I always use Dragon Pulse unless I am sure that Draco Meteor will KO because I like not missing and I also like not losing immediately if I get a prediction wrong.

Aegislash @ Leftovers
Ability: Stance Change
Level: 50
EVs: 252 HP / 148 SpA / 100 SpD / 8 Spe
Sassy Nature
IVs: 2 Spe
– Shadow Ball
– Flash Cannon
– Substitute
– Protect

The more I tested Aegislash the more I realized that its greatest strength is its Special Defense stat so I went with a Sassy nature and added a lot of Special Defense. It goes way past what is required to survive a Choice Specs Dark Pulse from Hydreigon. The EVs aren’t supposed to be too specific but I made sure that Flash Cannon + Drain Punch from Scrafty always got the KO on 252 HP Kangaskhan. This spread  2HKOs 4HP Kangaskahn with Flash Cannon around 80% of the time and this amount of Special Defense is enough to take a maximum roll from a Choice Specs Dark Pulse and have enough HP left to also take one turn of burn damage so that’s neat. I switched into Will-o-Wisps a lot during the tournament so this actually came up despite being a pretty strange calculation. This Aegislash has a 2 Speed IV which speed ties Ray’s Amoongus from his Virginia team so naturally I had to add more points in speed since I was afraid of running into it. If you would like to use Aegislash then use TheBattleRoom’s spread from his Worlds team; it’s almost identical to this one in function but it doesn’t waste a bunch of stat points by going further than it really needs to. There is no difference between Sassy and Quiet when it comes to numbers — it just changes the allocation of EVs. This Aegislash was crucial to my success. Once again Kangaskhan is one of the best and most prevalent Smeargle counters and Sub Aegislash is really nice against opposing Kangaskhan. It had really good synergy with my double Intimidate and in one game it survived both a Dark Pulse from Specs Hydreigon and a Thunderbolt from Rotom-W so maybe going way past what was necessary in Special Defense was worth it in the end. I selected Flash Cannon over Sacred Sword in order to KO Smeargle counter Aerodactyl after a Fake Out and to let me switch into Will-O-Wisps without losing damage potential.

Scrafty @ Assault Vest
Ability: Intimidate
Level: 50
EVs: 180 HP / 252 Atk / 4 Def / 68 SpD / 4 Spe
Adamant Nature
– Drain Punch
– Crunch
– Ice Punch
– Fake Out

This Scrafty was added in line the night before the tournament when the Sableye (which I wasn’t confident in anyway) that I had been testing wasn’t EV’d. I just kind of searched my box for something that had Synergy with the rest of the party. Scrafty was everything I wanted and more. It gave me double Intimidate, double Fake Out, and beats literally all of Smeargle’s counters. It Intimidates and Ice Punches public enemy number 1 Garchomp and does 70% with Drain Punch to enemy number 2 Kangaskhan. It one shots enemy 3 Tyranitar and beats obnoxious ghosts like Chandelure and Aegislash. For a last second addition that I never tested on this team it was probably the best Pokémon on the team.  Once again my EV spread is a tad arbitrary. I wanted max Attack Adamant because most of Scrafty’s bulk comes from Drain Punch instead of EV dumping. 180 HP was as low as I was willing to go to get the most out of Drain Punch healing, and because I ran Assault Vest I put a bunch of EVs into Special Defense in order to get more stat points off of my item. Scrafty needs 60 Defense in order to survive a Choice Band Brave Bird from Talonflame at -1 but I put it into Special Defense instead because I wasn’t worried about Talonflame and Scrafty probably couldn’t KO it anyway. I run Assault Vest over the other popular choice Lum Berry because Assault Vest is always on and is always an item. Lum Berry only counts as an item if they burn you. I like being efficient in what items I run.

I’m not going to talk about any of my matches because at this point I’ve forgotten most of them and the most interesting were against Gavin Michaels and Jon Hu who both wrote about our matches in their own reports. I also want to clear something up about my match against Ashton on stream. I said after the battle that I had chosen Smeargle instead of Rotom Game 3 because of the crowd. That was partly a joke. I knew from playing Ashton at a Premier Challenge that his Sawk OHKOs my Rotom-H. I decided that I wanted Follow Me and a Focus Sash more than I wanted Rotom. People were telling me how if I had brought Rotom then his Charizard couldn’t do anything to me. Well his Charizard couldn’t do anything to me anyway because Smeargle outspeds it. Or at least, that is what happened in Game 1. It turns out his Charizard was EVed to speed tie Smeargle (not on purpose according to Ashton) and I won the tie in Game 1 and  lost it in Game 3. If I had known it was a tie and not Smeargle being faster then I probably would have brought Rotom over it but the fact is that I thought that my team was well positioned to beat his team and it would have won if Heat Wave didn’t burn my Kangaskhan which allowed Heliolisk to tank a Sucker Punch.

At Fort Wayne Regionals where I finished 2^nd losing in the finals to Mancuso, I used a Choice Band Garchomp and a Sitrus Berry Zapdos over Salamence and Aegislash since they felt like they weren’t winning matches like they had a few months prior. I’m not sure if that was a good choice or not because Garchomp was good but not great and Zapdos I’d rather not talk about, but I guess they got me to my first ever top cut at a Regional so I’m thankful to them. Enough has been written about how the tournament was run so I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to say that I was really excited about who did make top cut as all of us (besides Dim) are from the same area and the top 4 felt like a Northern Ohio Premier Challenge. So shout outs to everyone in the Ohio/Michigan/West Virginia/Western Pennsylvania area because all of sudden we are now one of the strongest areas in the country! Now I want to make a few comments about the Pokémon game itself.

A Strategy Guide for Beginners

Have a Plan

I can’t understate the importance of having a plan. Almost every single successful team has some kind of strategy that they want to execute every game. Alex Ogloza’s Nationals team used Politoed and Ludicolo in order get his opponents’ Pokémon into Choice Band Brave Bird range. Jon Hu used Confuse Ray Sableye and Mega Gengar to create an extremely strong lock that left opponents without a whole lot of good options. Aaron Zheng had a similar plan that he tried to execute with a Heal Pulse Trick Room Gothitelle. Sejun Park used Follow Me and Tickle to defend his Mega Gyarados enough to set up a Dragon Dance. Smeargle’s plan is to counter lead the opposing Smeargle counters and get them off the field to allow Dark Void to be unstoppable. Never use a Pokémon because it just “counters a certain threat” or “it’s unexpected”. Everything you do in team building must contribute to your plan and what helps you execute you strategy. If you add a Pokémon that just “counters a specific threat” you are doing that because that threat will cause your plan to fail. Never try to counter everything, it just leads to your team not having a plan and therefore your team will be weak. No team can counter everything anyway. There is always a hole that someone will eventually exploit.

Be Efficient

I’m not talking about Effort Values because obviously I’m no good at that whatsoever and there have been many well written articles on this subject in the past. There is also item efficiency, turn efficiency, and making sure you are using the best Pokémon and best moves to execute your strategy. Some items are always an item and some items do not always count as an item. Choice items, Life Orb, Leftovers… these items are always on and always count as an item. Berries, Safety Goggles, Weakness Policy… these don’t always count as an item. If your opponent never uses a status move on you, then your Lum berry was not an item in that game. Safety Goggles isn’t an item if Tyranitar and Amoongus are not in the battle. Weakness Policy is not an item if the opponent never attacks you with a super effective attack, or if the super effective attack manages to KO. Items are an integral part of what makes a Pokémon strong, and if you are running too many items that don’t always function as items then your Pokémon might be lacking something that could have made it strong in that battle. I’m not claiming that any of these items that are not always on are bad — far from that — but I do think having too many of them in a party can be problematic as it might be decreasing the strength of your team.

Turn efficiency is just simply making the most of any given turn. The way you win a Pokémon battle is by doing more damage than the opponent. The simplest way to do that is to attack more than the opponent. Always keep in mind what targets let you attack the most and your opponent attack the least. As a simple example, let’s say your opponent has Garchomp and Mawile on the field, and you have Hydreigon and Ludicolo. Ignoring switching for this example, let’s say you know from game 1 the Mawile doesn’t run Sucker Punch. You know that Dragon Claw won’t KO Hydreigon and either of your Pokémon have the ability to KO Garchomp. If you decide to have Hydreigon use Flamethrower on Mawile and Ludicolo Ice Beam on Garchomp then you get the KO on Garchomp but your opponent got to use both Dragon Claw and Play Rough that turn. That is 2 attacks, whereas if you used both Flamethrower and Scald on Mawile then you get a KO, and your opponent only got to attack once that turn. Obviously to make this kind of play you need to be sure that your opponent’s Mawile won’t Protect so this play is a risk for you, but the point is to just keep in mind that it is important what Pokémon you attack in a situation where either of your Pokémon could get a KO. You also need to decide if switching makes the most out of your turn. Getting a type advantage or removing a -2 is nice, but that is a turn you aren’t attacking. I just think a lot of new players don’t prioritize targets well enough and believe it’s important for players to think about when they are first learning.

Make sure that you are using the correct Pokémon and moves for your plan. Garchomp and Zapdos do a lot of damage with Discharge + Earthquake, but did you know that Telepathy Gardevoir has the same base Special Attack as Zapdos and Dazzling Gleam has the same Base Power? Gardevoir also doesn’t share a weakness to Ice. You have the same plan and 2 completely different Pokémon choices. My plan for my Nationals team was to beat Garchomp. I had Rotom-H on my team and I could have run Will O Wisp, but I decided that KOing it with HP Ice and KOing Mawile with Overheat was more efficient than burning them. Sometimes a completely different Pokémon allows you to execute your strategy a lot better. Just keep in mind that what may seem like a big change may not be a big change at all but it may make your team significantly stronger. Also for players who are new to the game, a “standard” move set is standard because it is the best move set for that Pokémon. If you want to deviate from the standard set then you need to have a real reason for it. Don’t just say “I don’t want to be standard” because that is a losing mentality.

If you guys get anything out of this report at all, I want it to be this:

The game does not owe you anything

The RNG does not care how hard you have worked. I’m going to steal a quote from a Magic the Gathering article by James Fazzolari that I owe my first Regionals top cut to: “No matter how much time, energy or money you invest in the game, you deserve exactly zero success and zero recognition.” There will be games where the RNG decides to not let you have an opportunity to win. I know; I’ve had many of them at tournaments. However, I’m sure there are also many games that I have “lost to luck” where I could have made a different decision here or there to allow me to have a great enough advantage that I could still survive after a costly flinch. For too long I believed that just because I am a better player than my opponent, that I should beat them every time.  Just because I have practiced more that I deserve the win more. This isn’t true and it’s probably why I’ve had so little success at tournaments before Nationals this year. The approach I take now is that a 1-0 record just means that I might go 1-7. A 2-0 record just means you might go 2-6. Do not tell yourself before the start of the tournament, “I’ll get 5-6 wins today easily.” Telling yourself how you will do before any games begin is the quickest way to be disappointed. Always play to win; never play to prevent losing. Playing safe against someone who you believe you are better than leads to them having the opportunity to outplay you. Playing a certain style is perfectly fine against people you know, but don’t assume you know how a person you don’t know plays just because you haven’t seen their name in results lists. Obviously luck is a major factor in our game and the player who played better in any given game may not win, but they almost always do. A player who loses to luck may not have actually played better if they left win conditions open for their opponent. A critical hit turn 1 hurts but people win games down 3-4 all the time; if the game isn’t over yet you still have a chance. Luck can be an excuse for losing sometimes, but it is never an excuse for suboptimal play. I’d probably say the amount of games where the cartridge doesn’t let one person play the game is less than 10% of all games where the loser blames it. Cockiness gets you nowhere. Always play your best. The game owes you absolutely nothing.

I hope some readers got something out of this report. I’ll be going strong for a Worlds invite this year since I have never had the opportunity to yet. Playing in Worlds is probably my biggest dream at the moment so I look forward to getting the opportunity to play everyone in VGC ’15! One last thing, in the unlikely chance that AlphaZealot is reading this report, Dark Void is really bad for the game and despite my success with it, it probably should be re-banned for the sake of the game. I’ll keep on using it as long as it’s around because I’m a firm believer in using the biggest threats and will personally be a bit sad to see it go, but the fact is that the game as a whole is worse when Dark Void is legal and I’m pretty sure I gained no friends in 2014 by abusing it. Everyone please don’t hate me as I was only using what wins.

Thank you for reading!

About the Author

Amarillo has been playing VGC since 2010 on Netbattle Supremacy and misses the days that Kyogre was legal. He is working hard to obtain his first World Championships Invitation in the VGC 15 season.

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