Reports

Published on August 6th, 2014 | by Dim

8

Tungsten: US Nationals 17th Place Report

“The strongest steel is forged in the hottest fire.”

So, it’s that time of year again. A huge national tournament of around 500 people fades out into a tiny field of players who will be competing for glory at the World Championships. What this means, for me at least, is that there is another tournament to prepare for. However, it seems clear that one does not grow as a player without reflecting on their past. Nationals 2014 was a big tournament for me. I barely clinched a 7-2 record on day 1 followed by a 3-3 record on day 2, almost the absolute minimum I could achieve to reach the World Championships this year. Any team that can pull a player through that grueling gauntlet of day 1 into day 2 and still finish deserves some analysis, so I want to go through this team and explain it.

Building the Team

After testing several teams and not really “feeling” any of them, I decided to experiment with something that I’d used before to good success; the Trick Room concepts from my Winter Regionals team. I tried to replicate the successful elements. A Trick Room element that could be used to control unprepared teams combined with a core that would be effective even without speed control. I looked for Pokemon that were powerful across the board and fit in with a remade concept of the old team, and came up with this.

Choice Band Talonflame, Lum Garchomp, Chesto Rotom-Wash, Life Orb Tyranitar, Sitrus Gardevoir, Mega Mawile.

This version was fairly successful. It handled fast teams and Mega Kangaskhan based teams fairly well and had options for most situations that Mawile didn’t like to be in, such as Rotom-Wash for Rotom-Heat and Garchomp for other Fire types. Talonflame’s power and priority allowed it to deal with extremely quick teams when I was unable to set up Trick Room as well, giving me a bit of a safety net.

However, this team had some notable problems. It was relying too heavily on Life Orb Tyranitar for power it couldn’t provide and the team wasn’t able to protect the Chesto Rotom-Wash well enough to keep a good answer to Rotom-Heat available. It was also very hit-or-miss and relied far too much on the Trick Room option. Additionally, there was a lack of bulk on the team, making it hard to switch defensively and remain in a good position. When this team proved to not be up to the quality I had hoped, I decided to scrap it and move on to other teams.

One night, while I was testing one of those other teams, I realized that the Zapdos I had been testing on that team could work very well on the Trick Room centered team I had scrapped a while ago. This gave me a way to run it with Hydreigon as I had been wanting to do so I could improve the team’s firepower, and with the change to a Fire-type Rotom Forme to replace the less bulky Talonflame, I was left with the second iteration of what had been a dead idea.

Life Orb/Expert Belt Zapdos, Safety Goggles Rotom-Heat, Choice Specs Hydreigon, Sitrus Gardevoir, Mega Mawile, Lum Berry/Life Orb Garchomp

I, quite confidently, brought this team to the June International Challenge. However, my confidence cost me; in a rush to get started, I didn’t check the Rotom-Heat I used and found myself with one using Rest and Discharge and an oddly defensive spread. I wasn’t able to pick it very often and lost the utility of a Fire type on the team. Mix this together with tilt, intensified by my Spring Regionals performance and the response that I had, I lost. A lot. I was lost. My Rotom is probably still sleeping.

Following this, I was upset and wanted to find out how to fix a team that had been working so well before. One night I was messing around with the team against Collin Heier (TheBattleRoom) and he used Charizard-Y and Hydreigon together against me and beat me handily. Frustrated, I complained about my inability to use an appropriate Fire type due to their lack of existence in this years game. Collin suggested Charizard-Y to cover that.

Overview

This is actually the product of a lot of thinking and crafting with Collin Heier, Blake Hopper (MrBopper), and the result of test matches on Pokemon Showdown!. Although it doesn’t really mean a lot, I reached rank 2 on that ladder a week prior to Nationals with this team under the name Outstandingmarmot, solidifying a bit of my confidence in best of one where I wouldn’t usually have much. The best elements of the team were the Gardevoir+Mawile combination, the Zapdos, and the abuse of lead combinations with Charizard, aside from Charizard+Mawile. Mawile also had a lot of good lead combinations with its general effectiveness across the board, being able to be paired with almost anything as a lead. I think if I had more time to work with this team, that would be what I experimented with more; more creative leads to handle situations with any Pokemon, since the synergy between these Pokemon is already fairly good.

One of the weaknesses this team had was Sitrus Berry Rotom-H. While a lot of my Pokemon handled non-Sitrus variants fairly well to open the door for Mawile, not being able to get the Sitrus variant in less than two turns without Hydreigon was a big downside considering both of my Mega-evolutions and Zapdos struggled with it. Otherwise I didn’t really have problems with any particular Pokemon thanks to Charizard covering Amoonguss and Aegislash well. With that out of the way, I was able to focus the team on working with my adaptive and pseudo-defensive play style which led to the refinement of spreads and numbers.

Initially, I ran into the issue of three of my Pokemon hitting near to the 140 Speed mark, with Zapdos and Hydreigon at 140 and Charizard at 141. I didn’t like the fact that if something was faster or slower than these three, they would always be outpaced out of Trick Room or, in the case of the latter, in Trick Room. To remedy this, I moved Hydreigon up by making the EV spread more efficient so it hit 142 Speed and made Zapdos bulkier, making it have some more utility outside of the speed it had. However, it seems to be that when I make teams I hit the issue of static speed numbers pretty often, so my ideas for speed on my own teams probably need to be addressed. Regardless of my efforts, Smeargle could still be an issue if Garchomp dropped an attack into an evasion boost or went down early, so I kind of wanted better answers to Dark Void.

One of the big things about Nationals that threw me off was the meta being drastically different in day 2 than one would expect. Perhaps I should have seen this coming, but the teams that got there were often teams with weird twists or specific anti-meta choices that made them hard to play against with another team designed to counter specific elements of the meta game. This was truly a new element; while it seems that paying attention to the player who made day 2 has been a big deal, good and consistent team strategies were also important to evaluate in both their anti-meta attributes and their positive elements in terms of general synergy. It was extremely challenging to be successful with a team that only answered the day 1 or day 2 meta game, so Nationals success was as much a testament to the quality of your team as it was to the quality of a player (which could, admittedly, be considered synonymous).

The Team

Zapdos @ Life Orb
Ability: Pressure
EVs: 220 HP / 120 Def / 44 SpA / 96 SpD / 28 Spe
Modest Nature
IVs: 30 Atk / 30 Def / 29 SpD
– Roost
– Thunderbolt
– Hidden Power [Ice]
– Thunder Wave

Zapdos was one of the best Pokemon on the team. While I kind of regret running Thunder Wave since I had other answers to Kangaskhan and didn’t like using it that much, the three-move combination of Roost-Thunderbolt-Hidden Power Ice worked wonders in terms of coverage and defensive capability. Zapdos’ bulk and its Life Orb turned it into an all-terrain vehicle that could roll over anything and worked pretty universally in any match-up. I think at this point it’s solidified in my mind that Zapdos could easily turn out to be one of the best Pokemon in the meta game. After all,  it has great defenses and defensive typing coupled with the ability to answer both Garchomp and Salamence with the right EV spread. Electric is a fantastic type to receive STAB on due to it only being resisted by Dragon, Electric, and Ground, two of which are weak to Hidden Power Ice. Lists of the most common Dragon and Ground types both include Garchomp, so Hidden Power Ice works wonders. However, Zapdos was another one of the Pokemon that compounded my weakness to Rotom-H.

Roost in particular had some applications that saved me in several situations. While I was vulnerable to critical hits when doing this, I could position matches with a decent amount of time left into situations where Zapdos could Roost off damage and then win a battle solo against two opponents quite comfortably because of its bulk. This was a big deal in my game against Mancuso, where I had to set myself up for a 1v2 with Zapdos against Azumarill and -2 Sp. Atk Rotom-Heat to win the game. Without the Roost option I would have been unable to win that game due to the sheer amount of damage. Zapdos is a great candidate for Roost because of its excellent typing, leaving it with only two weaknesses to abuse. Therefore, it often took at least two turns to knock out; each Roost could extend the turns wasted significantly by the opponent significantly or push the opponent into a situation where they had to knock out Zapdos without actually having anything to knock it out, since I took out the thing that severely damaged Zapdos in the first place.

This EV spread was made to survive both Mega Mawile’s maximum Attack Adamant Play Rough and a single hit of Life Orb damage. It could also survive a Modest Choice Specs Salamence Draco Meteor, albeit not taking the Life Orb damage afterwards should I choose to get the KO on Salamence with Hidden Power Ice. The Special Attack EVs allow it to both one-hit KO Garchomp and two-hit KO Mega Kangaskhan, proving that Zapdos’ damage holding Life Orb was still relatively high despite its significant defensive investment. The Speed allowed me to outpace max Speed Bisharp by two points, since 4 EVs would always be wasted due to the Special Defense IV and Defense IV of the Zapdos I had (the extra 4 are in Special Defense on this spread) where if I was using a flawless Zapdos I would have been able to outpace Jolly max Speed Tyranitar all of the time as well. Fortunately, that wasn’t an issue.

Mawile @ Mawilite
Ability: Intimidate
EVs: 252 HP / 108 Atk / 4 Def / 124 SpD / 20 Spe
Adamant Nature
– Iron Head
– Play Rough
– Sucker Punch
– Protect

Mawile was my primary Mega choice to answer the ever-present Mega Kangaskhan. By removing the opponent’s answers to Mawile (usually Fire types, Amoonguss, and Aegislash) I could go into Trick Room and win near-instantaneously or at least gain a massive advantage. However, Mawile is not only a Trick Room Pokemon. The defensive and offensive investment, along with a significant speed creep to outrun other Mawiles, allowed it to function effectively outside of Trick Room and without Gardevoir. This was the reason I decided to use Gardevoir as my Trick Room setter; I wanted both my Trick Room sweeper and my setter to be able to function well without ever using Trick Room, but I wanted to have the option of controlling an opponent whose team would otherwise be too fast for my team to handle.

The decision to run Iron Head is one that may be slightly confusing considering my weakness to Fire types, but I’ll stand by it in saying that its neutral coverage and perfect accuracy justify picking it. There was really never a situation where I wanted any other move. It might be argued that Rock Slide would be viable to do damage to Rotom-H, but there is still no situation where I can double-target it and KO in one turn with Gardevoir/Mawile if it has Sitrus, so this was irrelevant save for the Charizard match-up which was already well handled by Zapdos/Hydreigon.

The EV spread was slightly skewed; it was intended to get the 50% chance to one-hit KO 4 HP Tyranitar with Play Rough and be 3 hit KO’d by maximum Special Attack Rotom Thunderbolts most of the time, forcing opposing Rotom-Wash to use the ever inaccurate Hydro Pump. However, I was thwarted by my desire to do this to all opposing Rotom-Wash and missed the 50% one-hit KO on Tyranitar. Regardless, Mawile’s bulk served me well at Nationals. To explain the 20 Speed, Collin (TheBattleRoom) told me that he felt that using Mawile in a less Trick Room oriented situation justified running Speed to outpace other Mawiles and Azumarills. With him being the self-proclaimed Mawile expert, I decided to go with the extra Speed. This gave me the option to not worry about setting up Trick Room against opposing Mawile teams and not worry as much about Speed ties.

Charizard @ Charizardite Y
Ability: Blaze
EVs: 220 HP / 108 Def / 12 SpA / 4 SpD / 164 Spe
Modest Nature
– Heat Wave
– Overheat
– SolarBeam
– Protect

This Charizard (and my Gardevoir!) is completely ripped from Simon Yip’s team report of his team that also used Charizard/Mawile together. If you would like an explanation of the EV spread, you can see it there. I selected this EV spread because, when I tried to make my own spread, I was coming up with exactly the same numbers and wanted to do all of the same things, so I stuck with it.

However, the EV spread isn’t the thing in question; it’s the selection! I decided to run double Mega hesitantly, not because I specifically wanted to use the team archetype of “double Mega”, but because Rotom-Heat was a bad Fire type on my team and didn’t handle the problems the team was having. To put it specifically, this team absolutely hated running into any team with the combination of Aegislash/Amoonguss. With Rotom-Heat, I had to Overheat, switch out, and Overheat again. This was an invalid strategy because it: risked the opponent playing the game well, used up too much momentum, and didn’t always get one-hit KOs on the targets. Aegislash could even set up a Substitute in my face! I spent a lot of time thinking about this issue and some particular match-ups until I was playing best of 3s against Collin that fateful night and he suggested Mega Charizard Y over Rotom-Heat. After trying it, it seemed vastly superior to my prior choice in terms of match-ups and performance. It also helped the rain match-up a little bit, although most rain teams these days are running Rain Dance and I forgot that while considering how to play against them.

Hydreigon @ Choice Specs
Ability: Levitate
EVs: 28 HP / 36 Def / 252 SpA / 4 SpD / 188 Spe
Modest Nature
– Draco Meteor
– Dark Pulse
– Fire Blast
– Dragon Pulse

Choice Specs Hydreigon was my lone cowboy; my singular Pokemon that hard-countered Rotom-Heat. The gunslinger’s exceedingly powerful attacks ripped through teams when they got a chance to do so and helped even up my neutral coverage. This Pokemon had a high chance to KO 4 HP Mega Kangaskhan, could one-hit KO Rotom-Heats, and severely damage Venusaur. It also knocked out max HP Aegislash, one of Mawile’s biggest problem Pokemon, 62.5% of the time with Dark Pulse. Dark Pulse could 2 hit KO almost anything that didn’t resist it as well. Dragon Pulse, of course, sufficed for Dragon coverage when I didn’t want to use/didn’t want to miss Draco Meteor.

The EV spread is simplistic and designed to maximize output. I ran the absolute minimum HP and Defense to survive Garchomp Dragon Claws 100% of the time, allowing me to out speed my own Charizard-Y by one point and serving as the fastest member of the almost-the-same-speed-but-not-quite trio of Zapdos/Charizard/Hydreigon when I was using a faster Zapdos. While this forfeits some of my defensive capability against Special attacks, increasing the chance to be knocked out by Modest maximum Special Attack Salamence Dragon Pulses, I feel as though the Speed was definitely worth it and proved itself to be so during the event. Otherwise, Choice Specs Hydreigon doesn’t need a lot of explanation: have synergy with my team, shoot meteors, knock things out.

Gardevoir @ Sitrus Berry
Ability: Trace
EVs: 252 HP / 124 Def / 108 SpA / 20 SpD / 4 Spe
Modest Nature
– Trick Room
– Will-O-Wisp
– Moonblast
– Psychic

This was also ripped straight from Simon Yip’s team report, and with good reason! This Gardevoir, with its Sitrus Berry, was incredibly bulky for something with paper-thin physical defenses. It seemed to be the best Pokemon I could select to set up  Trick Room for my team. I did want to have Will-O-Wisp for its utility against opposing physical attackers and Kangaskhan though, so dropping Protect was a necessity.

So, aside from bulk, why did I select Gardevoir? After all, Reuniclus would have been awesome here! Reuniclus has Helping Hand for Charizard and Hydreigon, great bulk, good special attack, and a much easier time setting up Trick Room thanks to Overcoat. Well, the most obvious thing I could say would be: Will-O-Wisp! Also: Moonblast! However, I can expound upon that. The real reason I selected Gardevoir for this slot was its ability to work well with the rest of the team outside of Trick Room. I didn’t want to rely on anything that could be thwarted easily by flinches or criticals, and I also felt unsure about running into Amoonguss, Aegislash, or Rotom-Heat with a hard Trick Room core. In truth, not dedicating myself to Trick Room was what allowed me to run things like Charizard and Garchomp with the Gardevoir, and allowed me not to forfeit Fairy coverage if I didn’t want to pick Mawile into a matchup. Gardevoir and Mawile together gave me a more versatile “list” of answers than Reuniclus and Mawile could have on this particular team. However, I would advise experimenting with better checks to Rotom-Heat and testing Reuniclus on the team if you want to try it out — those are definitely some things that could work better for your playstyle and you could make a really cool team. I, for one, felt very comfortable with this choice and was very happy about the fact that I was using Gardevoir/Mawile at nationals because of their excellent synergy, even when they weren’t next to each other.

Garchomp @ Lum Berry
Ability: Rough Skin
EVs: 4 HP / 252 Atk / 252 Spe
Jolly Nature
– Dragon Claw
– Rock Slide
– Earthquake
– Protect

Garchomp is the Swiss army knife of the 2014 meta game. It has ways to help against several common megas, with Rough Skin hitting Kangaskhan, Rock Slide hitting Charizard Y, and Earthquake hitting Mawile. My Garchomp cleared up problems by using Earthquake to help against Aegislash, opposing Mawile, and grounded fire types. More importantly, it provided a fast Rock Slide user, allowing me to better answer fast Charizard-Y which could ruin my day. Rock slide also helped to deal with those pesky Rotom-Heats, albeit not too much due to Rotom-Heat’s bulk while holding Sitrus Berry. Rough Skin could function as a last ditch effort to do damage to Kangaskhan to put it in range for one of the team’s powerful attackers to knock out. Garchomp’s speed and Lum Berry also made it an effective answer to Smeargle, which could actually give my team quite a bit of trouble. My only regret with this Pokemon after nationals is that I didn’t decide to use a bulkier Adamant set to better abuse Garchomp’s coverage and natural bulk so it could function outside of serving as a specific counter for certain things.

Synergy

While the team could really work with any Pokemon in combination with any other Pokemon, it seems pretty evident to me that certain pairings let me do things that other pairings couldn’t. With that said, I feel it’s appropriate to go into detail about some of these combinations.

+ 

The legendary CharChomp combination! Charizard and Garchomp together provide powerful spread coverage and answers to many of the common Pokemon. Their combined damage on both enemies — with Heat Wave and Rock Slide or Earthquake hitting a collective 4 times in one turn — could generally provide an answer to a great deal of the metagame and gave some specific teams, such as Randy Kwa’s, a lot of trouble. They also had respectable synergy on the field with the Flying and Ground combination. This lead, when nothing else worked, seemed to work very often as a neutral pick and was hard to switch into due to its spread moves. For this reason, I really liked having it on my team.

+ 

These two are some of the bulkiest Pokemon on my team and function well as a pairing if I want to be able to set up Trick Room or wear away at an opponent with strong neutral Moonblasts and Thunderbolts. Trick Room could also have high utility, with these two hitting a middle of the ground speed tier and therefore outpacing several Pokemon in Trick Room, such as the Garchomp / Charizard combination I mentioned above. This lead was one of the ones I picked the most often due to this as well as its ability to set up moderately well for Mawile to come in, with Psychic and Thunderbolt doing respectable damage to Rotom-Heat formes and both Zapdos and Gardevoir being able to get powerful Dragon types out of the way. It also provided double status, letting me beat Kangaskhan my way (™). Will-O-Wisp worked if I wanted to set up Trick Room the following turn, and Thunder Wave worked if I was against a slower-paced team that wasn’t affected by Trick Room. Regardless, after this lead had done its damage, it opened the door for what would usually be Hydreigon and Mawile to serve as the cleanup crew.

+ 

The double dragon combo rises again! These two worked well to quickly dismantle an unprepared team, offering powerful Draco Meteors mixed with Earthquakes and Rock Slides (the natural disaster lead?) to quickly remove problem Pokemon for my team. Rotom-Heat absolutely did not like running into these two, so either mega I could have brought in the back could benefit from advantageous situations set up by Garchomp and Hydreigon.

+

Unresisted Overheat and Draco Meteor could knock out almost anything. This, coupled with decent typing and Charizard’s Heat Waves or Overheats handling steel types for Hydreigon’s dragon attacks gave me another all around powerful lead that could bust holes in a team quickly. This was one of the leads I was losing to in practice as well and wanted to find a way to abuse myself.

 + 

This is another one of the leads that allow me to set up Trick Room for Mawile early. It seems like a running theme that when I lead with Hydreigon, I want to deal with the opposing Rotom-Heat right away. Its ability to deal massive damage to Kangaskhan forced my opponent to prioritize knocking out Hydreigon instead of Gardevoir, putting them in a negative situation should Trick Room go up on the turn Hydreigon faints. Even if they don’t knock out Hydreigon and Trick Room goes up anyways, Jolly maximum speed Kangaskhan is still faster than Hydreigon putting Kangaskhan at risk even without Mawile coming in. This was also my most balanced lead option, taking my second fastest Pokemon with my second slowest Pokemon and taking my most offensive Pokemon with my (second) most defensive. Thus, these two had great versatility and effectiveness together in a multitude of matchups.

Closing Remarks

Well, that seems to be it! I don’t like going into matches at length because taking notes about turns can be very distracting for me and I don’t remember specific turns any more than I have to. I really just wanted to explain the team and help people understand why it was, at least in my opinion, “good.” While I didn’t have anything particularly fancy and didn’t use Trick Room as much as I liked, it was still really fun to play and as successful as it needed to be. I doubt I can thank everyone who deserves it here, but a big general thank you goes out to everyone who supported me in my practice and was kind even when they didn’t have to be. It’s the community that makes this game what it is (I mean, aside from the Pokemon part) and the experience I’ve had practicing and building for nationals has been great. I absolutely do not care if you steal this team and hope that perhaps the mistakes I made (and hopefully pointed out well enough –hello, Rotom-Heat!) will help others learn to make better teams. At the moment I’m working on my ability to work through matchups mentally and theory out a team correctly. After I get that down I think I’ll make better, more consistent, more logical teams. I would like to wish everyone who’s still playing this season a whole-hearted “Good luck!” and I thank you for reading this.

About the Author

Dim has been playing competitive Pokemon for 5 years now. In 2012 he won the Pokemon World Championships in the senior division. He likes chocolate, running, gaming, and coming up with weird ideas about gaming.

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