Reports

Published on February 20th, 2014 | by tanzying

7

Kangaskhan Pyroar – 23rd Battle Road Gloria Kyushu 1st Place Team Report

This is a translation of see_miruo‘s team, who won the 23 Ganyu offline tournament with it, by Tan Zong Ying (tanzying). The original is located at Miruo’s blog, and we would like to thank him for his permission to post this translation. Miruo qualified for the National finals of the Battle Road Gloria tournament circuit with this victory and we would like to wish him the best of luck as he advances.

80 participants entered the tournament, which was divided into the preliminary group stage and a top cut. In the group stage, participants were placed in groups of 8 to 9 players and played best-of-1 sets against every other player in their group, with the best two players of each group advancing to the top 16 which was a single elimination format with best-of-1 games. Miruo took 6 wins and 1 loss to player Viera during the preliminaries, and then stormed through the top 16 undefeated to emerge as champion. The results of the tournament can be found here.

Kangaskhan Pyroar – My 23rd Ganyu Offline Tournament (Battle Road Gloria Circuit) 1st Place Team Report

Despite being the tournament organiser myself, I managed to win the event!

• Tournament results post
• Finals video

Because of that, I think I shall start off my first XY report by introducing the team that I used. As the title suggests, it’s a team that includes Kangaskhan and Pyroar. My preliminary round results were 6 wins and 1 loss, and after that I took 4 victories in the 16-man top cut to emerge as the overall winner. Incidentally, my loss in the preliminary rounds was to Viera who was also running a team including Pyroar.

Pokémon Used

Team Construction Details

For this team, the Pokémon that was my first consideration to build the team around was Pyroar.

Pyroar sightings in the current metagame have been few and far between, but I believed that it was a Pokémon that could truly demonstrate its strength in the Kalos Doubles environment, and so took the plunge and ran with it. I have stuff I’d like to say about the finer points about the rest of the team, but I would like to expound on Pyroar for the time being.  Let me start off by talking about why I used this Pokémon in the first place.

Firstly, let’s consider it from a typing perspective. Pyroar is a Fire/Normal type. In Kalos Doubles, Fire types are usually used for their ability to hit Steels super effectively and resist Fairy type attacks. More on the first point in particular: the metagame is currently full of Steel types such as Mawile and Aegislash, and I believe that having no way to deal with them would make winning a difficult matter. In other words, it could be said that in the current metagame, teams carrying Fire types are a relatively normal state of affairs, but what about the Fire types being used in the current metagame?

Arena offline tournament (Battle Road Gloria Kanto region qualifiers) results post

http://pokemonarena.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-32.html

Usage counts (115 participants)

• 42 Talonflame
• 17 Charizard
• 7 Rotom-H, 7 Chandelure
• 3 Torkoal

Hibu offline tournament (Battle Road Gloria Chu-Shikoku region qualifiers) results post

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/hiroshima_off/20140201

Usage counts (47 participants)

• 15 Talonflame
• 11 Charizard
• 7 Chandelure
• 3 Rotom-H

I decided to consider the tournaments that acted as qualifiers for the Battle Road Gloria circuit. Naturally, there are other Pokémon at the forefront of usage, but I have left out the non-fire typed ones. Let’s take a look at the Pokémon with high usage counts individually.

Talonflame

Rather than its Fire typing, this Pokémon tends to leave a much stronger impression with its Gale Wings-boosted Flying type attacks. Equipped with an offensive item, priority Brave Birds are excellent at softening up the opponent during openings and mopping up worn-down does during the endgame alike. However, against Mawile and Aegislash, as a user of (effectively) the only physical STAB fire attack in the metagame, it frequently struggles due to things like Intimidate and King’s Shield going off. There do exist some Overheat-running variants though, which would perhaps patch this flaw up a little.

Charizard

Attention-worthy and on the rise in usage recently, is none other than the excellently endowed ability-wise Mega Charizard Y. With its Drought ability counteracting other weathers and boosting its special attacking firepower, it is a rather self-contained Pokémon compared to the other Mega Evolutions and performs very well. This Pokémon can bring down Steel types with ease.

Chandelure

Its usage is not really all that high, but the Ghost and Fire attacks fired off from its impressive special attack stat are certainly a threat. With the Infiltrator ability granting its attacks the ability to pierce substitutes, it performs well as a counter to Substitute Aegislash.

Rotom-H and Torkoal, too, are able to perform their roles to a certain extent when facing down Steel types, I dare say. However, a flaw exists with all these Pokémon.

The first thing that troubled me about these Pokémon was the Rock weakness. Rock Slide is a particularly strong move in double battles. If Pokémon like Talonflame and Charizard, found in so many teams, are caught in the deluge, they suffer fatal damage. In particular, when taking Rock Slides from faster opponents, between the chance to flinch and the increased critical hit rate in XY, even people who have made specific adjustments to withstand the attack often find things not going according to plan. And, a wielder of this attack happens to be none other than the Pokémon said to top the usage counts in this metagame, Garchomp. Furthermore, thanks to Garchomp’s Ground typing and often-carried Earthquake, Fire types have a really hard time dealing with it.

With this in mind, Fire types do seem to be in a rather tight spot. However, the Pokémon I used this tournament, Pyroar, solved all these problems for me. First of all, with a Life-Orb boosted Overheat, it manages to KO Mawile, Aegislash and company, assuming stantard spreads. So far, no difference from other Fire types. In fact, one might say that it is a little inferior in comparison to Chandelure and Charizard Y. However, this Pokémon has a higher base speed stat than Garchomp and is able to strike first with a Life Orb-boosted Hidden Power Ice.

In the Kalos Doubles metagame, the so called “top meta Pokémon” Garchomp is king of the usage statistics. Pokémon that can achieve this feat without the use of a speed-boosting item or move are scarce. I then made the judgement that conversely, Pokémon that were able to achieve this possessed the ability to be a contender in this ruleset. In an environment that suffers from a dearth in speed control, the original speed stat becomes especially important.

I’ve rambled on for quite a bit, but in essence the thought process goes something along the lines of “Gotta take care of Mawile and Aegislash quickly -> use a Fire type -> Garchomp is everywhere and makes my life miserable -> a Fire type that can outspeed and smack Garchomp hard would be perfect -> PYROAR SHO STRONG“

Delphox also exists and satisfies these requirements, but taking super effective Sucker Punches and Shadow Balls from the Steel types it wants to handle worried me so I decided not to use it. On the other hand, Pyroar, with its Normal typing, takes at best halved damage from the frequently seen special attacking Aegislash and so pins it down really well.

After grasping the nature of Pyroar and deciding to use it, I went about looking for Pokémon that complemented it well. I arrived at two possible candidates, Kangaskhan and Mawile, who have an above-average matchup with other Pokémon though they cannot boast of the same against opposing Mawile, Aegislash and Garchomp. Kangaskhan and Mawile are rather strong against opponents who simply swing firepower around to their hearts’ content, so I basically aimed to create a team that utilised the power of a high BST Mega, like many teams currently out there.

I was dithering over which Mega to use all the way up to the day before the tournament, but since I had Pyroar Life Orbed, I decided to go with Kangaskhan which allowed me the use of the well-known tactic within Kalos doubles, “Fake Out + Nuke”. The line-up ended up becoming rather standard, so even with a Pokémon like Pyroar in it, it felt easy to use. The rest of the Pokémon were used to deal with stuff that the Kangaskhan-Pyroar combination had trouble handling.

• Filling the Intimidator role, the Choice Scarfed, Stone Edge-totting Charizard Y hunter: Salamence
• The Steel and Fairy-resist and solution to opposing Trick Room, Kangaskhan and Mawile: Aegislash
• The relatively stable counter to opposing Tyranitar, who appears in both physical and special forms and gives the rest of the team a hard time: Azumarill
• The Fairy STAB-wielding Dragon counter that synergises well as a lead with Kangaskhan: Gardevoir

I played around with substituting other major Pokémon in such as Garchomp and Rotom-W, but the above four were what I settled on in the end. Given that I managed to win the tournament with them, I think the line-up is pretty good.

Truth be told, even though I used Pyroar, it was actually my fellow player Viera who noticed that Pyroar might actually be good and was considering a team built around it. It looked silly at first glance and I was in two minds about whether it actually worked well. But this was Viera, after all, and I was confident that if he of all people had spoken well of it, it couldn’t be all that bad, so I gave it a shot and it indeed ended up exceeding my expectations. Besides Viera, Inoseno was another player who had been considering a Pyroar team, and his build helped me to complete mine as well. It was thanks to them that I managed to grind my way to a championship with Pyroar this tournament and for that I am grateful.

Team Outline

This is a Kangaskhan and Pyroar-centric beatdown-style team. It plays something along the lines of using Pyroar and the other Pokémon to take out things Kangaskhan has trouble with. Because the other Pokémon are able to hit hard as well, the team can carry on fighting even after Kangaskhan has been worn out from repeated Double-Edges.

Besides Kangaskhan + Pyroar, this team is also capable of combinations such as the often seen Kangaskhan + Choice Specs Gardevoir, and the consistent combination of 2x Fairies + Pyroar, so there are a great variety of options that I can elect to lead with. Also, even though compatibility-wise Kangaskhan and Pyroar happen to have a shared Fighting weakness, every other Pokémon on the team takes at most halved damage from Fighting type attacks, so I was not worried about that at all.

As for Gardevoir and Azumarill, the last two spots I filled on the team, I had been testing major metagame Pokémon such as Garchomp and Rotom-W from the start but always felt that they opened up holes in the team, so I finally decided that no matter what I used there was bound to be some flaw and used these Pokémon, which I was most confident in handling well.

Individual Analyses

Kangaskhan

What I require from this Pokémon is the brute force that comes with its Mega Evolution. It’s probably possible to infer its strength from the usage statistics of tournaments alone. I used Double-Edge, and the extra firepower widened the range of things I could take out as compared to when I used Return. Because of the existence of recoil, it is perhaps a little questionable whether Double-Edge actually helps me win the damage race, but since a fainted opponent can’t damage me back, I think that depending on the situation it can end up to my advantage.

I also ran Power-up Punch, which is an excellent coverage attack on Kangaskhan, but when leading with Kangaskhan I would often go with Fake Out -> Double-Edge and almost never attacked with Power-up Punch.

I shall now press on and explain how the other Pokémon deal with stuff Kangaskhan cannot KO/counter, starting with Pyroar.

Pyroar

It might not be exaggerating to say that I built this team just to use this Pokémon.

Whatever Kangaskhan has trouble with, this Pokémon’s role is to take it down with Overheat and Hidden Power Ice. But although a Life Orbed Overheat KOs Aegislash and Mawile with a decent margin of safety, Life Orbed HP Ice will just barely miss the OHKO on defenses-uninvested Garchomp on the lowest damage roll (Note: 1/16 chance). Factor in the significant amount of Focus Sashed Garchomp, and the possibility that Garchomp may survive to return fire with Earthquake means that care must be taken in such situations. Possible ways to deal with this include chipping it a little first, perhaps with Fake Out, before going for the kill with HP Ice.

I used Hyper Voice as my third attacking move. This was originally Snarl, but Hyper Voice was good at racking up damage on opponents and was a better match with my playstyle and the team’s steamrolling concept. Being able to chip decent-sized chunks of HP off even Fire-resisting Pokémon such as Rotom-W and Gyarados is one of Pyroar’s defining characteristics. In the actual tournament, Pyroar really managed to shine, doing things such as outspeeding and sniping unwary Garchomp and taking out the Pokémon beside the opponent’s Steel type on the field with Hyper Voice while flaunting its Fire typing (Note: presumably threatening the Steel type into taking defensive measures).

Incidentally, Pyroar’s gender ratio is skewed in favour of female and I had to spend quite some effort on breeding a male one. I looked it up and it is apparently a 1:3 male-female ratio but I somehow felt it was more similar to the (1:7) ratio of the starter Pokémon. The male looks so much cooler anyway so I didn’t mind the effort.

Gardevoir

This Pokémon was included towards the end of the team-building process. It wasn’t so much of a counter, but more of a “do stuff I kind of want to do” slot, so I boosted its damage output by having it wear Choice Specs. I wanted a Pokémon other than Pyroar who could lead alongside Kangaskhan, and Gardevoir was a perfect fit for the role.

Even though, as previously mentioned, its item is Choice Specs, I didn’t invest a lot of EVs into special attack, but diverted them into bulk instead. The popular Gardevoir variants out there are 252/252 in special attack and speed, and Scarfed or Specsed, but these are all OHKOed by a Life Orbed Talonflame Brave Bird. I could have attempted to remedy this by including an Intimidate user in the team, but it isn’t as if I would have reason to bring Salamence to every battle, so I invested in bulk all the way up to the point where I would be able to withstand a Choice Banded Talonflame Brave Bird. This way I had a build that could stand on its own better. Also, to gain the initiative against Tyranitar which threatened much of my team, I invested enough in speed to be able to outrun 252 EV neutral natured Tyranitar. This took up almost all my EVs, and I dumped the rest into special attack. The resulting performance it showed me left me with nothing to criticise. Being able to survive attacks that 252/252 spreads could not made it quite easy to use, and I feel that this was definitely the correct EV distribution to use.

Azumarill

This Pokémon, like Gardevoir, was also a late addition. Things like Garchomp and Rotom-W were originally contenders for this position, but I ended up bringing Azumarill in order to beef up my countermeasures against the often-used Tyranitar. The Tyranitar sets in use span an incredibly diverse range from Mega Evolving Dragon Dancing physical attacker to special moves only. Even Garchomp often has Ice Beam to fear, forcing it to play conservatively. Rotom-W has a nice type match-up, but after considering the flinches from Rock Slide and Dark Pulse and Hydro Pump and Will-o-Wisp’s accuracy woes, I just couldn’t convince myself that it would cut it. In particular, I considered boosting Hydro Pump with some sort of offensive item, but since Gardevoir already had dibs on the Choice Specs, that too was a no-go.

Therefore, I put in Azumarill, who had caught my eye and is able to resist all of special attacking Tyranitar’s attacks, and playtested. It added a priority attack, which the team lacked, and dealt with Rhyperior well using its 4x super effective moves in place of Kangaskhan and Pyroar, who even though could hit it super effectively obviously didn’t have enough firepower to take it out. Furthermore, the Rotom-Ws that plague Azumarill are taken care of by Kangaskhan and Gardevoir, so there is some good synergy there.

Azumarill itself had attracted much attention even before XY was launched due to its newly-received Fairy type, but it doesn’t seem to be used much now in the current metagame, and being able to throw it onto a team and use it was indeed a good opportunity.

Salamence

The team’s only Intimidate user, whose speed I boosted by Choice Scarfing it. Salamence gains many advantages from holding a Scarf, such as escaping from the highly contested 100 base speed tier and getting the jump on the originally faster 130 base speed Pokémon, but after everything is said and done what I wanted Salamence to do for me was counter Mega Charizard Y. Recent tournaments have seen a rise in usage of Charizard, and there are also those bulk-invested ones that a Rock Slide not at full power (Note: due to the 75% modifier on spread moves) doesn’t KO. So I used Stone Edge to be able to OHKO those as well. Other than that, it also outsped and took chunks out of troublesome Pokémon with diverse movepools like Mega Manectric, and overall helped my team with its speed issues. Also, the Dragon type nuke that is Draco Meteor was also perfect for mopping up the opponent’s remnants during the endgame.

I didn’t think too much about the EV spread and used 252/252 special attack and speed, but it handled well without problems.

Aegislash

Another currently popular Kalos Doubles Pokémon, with a typing that excels equally in offense and defense. I used the Leftovers Substitute set, which I simply felt to have the best specs. Substitute provides opportunities to checkmate the opponent, and provides a layer of insurance against the drawbacks of Stance Change. It blocks the opponent’s otherwise consistent Fairy and Dragon type attacks. I led with it during the finals of the tournament. With the good coverage of STAB Shadow Ball, it can also be used in the opening to wail on the opponent — truly, a Pokémon of many capabilities. In this team, I often used it to help deal with the offensive pressure exerted by opposing Kangaskhan and Mawile.

Using Substitute to dodge enemy Sucker Punches and strike back safely is a very advantageous manoeuvre. Substitute Leftovers Aegislash is a reliable Pokémon that has come to be used in many other teams, and being able to use this team and learn a different way of playing Aegislash was a big accomplishment.

Conclusion

Opportunities to use rarely-seen Pokémon in this metagame were few and far between, but this time Pyroar sure helped me out a lot. The time I spent the previous day fine-tuning everything really paid off. This tournament was not only my self-organised tournament, but also the Battle Road Gloria Kyushu qualifier tying into a nationwide tournament, so I was happy to win it. The feeling was truly Glorious!

I shall work hard in order to not disgrace the title of Kyushu representative at the National finals.

It’s been a late first blog post about XY content, but I’d like to thank the readers who have been following my blog up till now.

About the Author

tanzying is a VGC player hailing from the tropical island of Singapore. Previously involved mostly in translating Japanese VGC blog articles for the rest of the world, organising official VGC events and friendlies with other countries for Singapore has come to be his primary role.

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