Smogon Premier League 9: UU Discussion

Finchinator

-OUTL
is a Tournament Directoris a Top Social Media Contributoris a Community Leaderis a Community Contributoris a Smogon Discord Contributoris a Top Tiering Contributoris a Contributor to Smogonis a Top Smogon Media Contributoris a Top Dedicated Tournament Hostis a Senior Staff Member Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Moderator Alumnusis a Past WCoP Championis the defending OU Circuit Championis a Two-Time Former Old Generation Tournament Circuit Champion
OU Leader
I tested and discussed a lot of UU this tournament because I did not draft a ton of support for Manipulative and I wanted to at least try and help out, so I guess I will drop my two cents.

Overall, UU is not a particularly bad metagame, but it is congested at the top to where checking everything becomes problematic in teambuilding, imo, unless you're using stall, which has its own issues. I personally believe that Azumarill has been and still is pretty broken -- a lot of games thus far have been either determined by or at least significantly impacted by predicting around Azumarill as there are so few actual counters to it that fit onto more offensive or even balanced teams. That does not itself make it broken alone, but it surely helps the case.

This is not meant to be some "ban Azumarill" or suspect oriented post and I am by no means asserting that I know more than the council or tier mains, quite the contrary tbh. I am sure that if I had a more open perspective of teambuilding like many of the active players did, different alleys of counterplay would be brought to my perspective and I think some builders this SPL have actually done a stellar job at showing that themselves. Some pretty cool examples have been the offensive teams with Z-Belch Hydreigon that do not give Azumarill much of a switch-in and when they seem to with Hydreigon, they simply lure it in and remove it and balanced teams with Z-Haze Tentacruel (although he does not last very long vs Azumarill regardless, it at least gives some early game breathing room to work with). Everything considered, I find it really interesting how players adapt to metagame trends in this tier and I think of all of the lower tier playerbases, UU has definitely done the best job when it comes to teambuilding for the tournament metagame and their specifics opponents.

I've actually had a lot of fun watching guys like Christo pump out a pretty varied group of effective teams for this tournament and display them throughout his games with success. Going from pretty standard, momentum oriented offense to hard stall to TSpikes balance just over the last half of the season and doing so in a timely fashion has been pretty impressive to me as a spectator. The same can be said for HT, more or less -- while HT tends to lean more offensive/bulky-offensive from what I can see, it is pretty clear he does a solid job when it comes to utilizing win-conditions/cores tailored to what is most common and what he likely expects from his opponents each week. I could go on, but my point is that I think UU has a pretty strong group of tournament players right now that have developed over the past year or two and I am interested to see what people come up with and how it may impact the tier throughout UUPL/GS/Snake.

Personally, I did not really innovate much or even play a large role in builds my team brought besides going through threat lists and grinding out test games with my own unproven teams, but there was one set that I proposed to Manipulative to add-on to a team that I thought was pretty interesting that I'll discuss in the hide tags below. It's obviously nothing too important and I honestly hesitated to even include this in my post, but I figured why not :shrug:

Aggron-Mega @ Aggronite
Ability: Filter
EVs: 240 HP / 4 Atk / 16 Def / 248 SpD
Careful Nature
- Stealth Rock
- Heavy Slam
- Fire Punch
- Stone Edge

I do not think this is already like semi-standard or something because I have not seen it through some laddering, a buncha test games, and all of SPL/Snake -- really only seen Curse and Ice Punch in this slot, but if it is then mb. Anyway, I feel like a lot of bulky-o teams with Mega Aggron tend to rely on it as a primary Steel type and Flying resist, so with Moltres rising in popularity as of late it makes those teams kinda inherently weak to it. Manip's team week 8 vs Rob had a similar problem (Serp/Prima/Lati/Krook/M-Aggron/Nape) - no switch-ins to Moltres really and also the rare Talonflame got an SD up and pretty much claimed whatever was in front of it. While Curse is really neat to help get past Gliscor and some other bulkier pivots that cannot threaten you a ton, Stone Edge allows you to lure and remove Moltres and Talonflame (or simply stop the latter from sweeping outright, which is obviously helpful when it comes into play) and if you already have a stronger special attacker to take advantage of the things you normally would Curse up on, then it can really be the optimal fourth move imo. Oh and it also gaurantees a kill on Mega Pidgeot after Stealth Rock with the 4 Atk EVs and the help of No Gaurd whereas Heavy Slam only does so 44% of the time.
 

Users Who Are Viewing This Thread (Users: 1, Guests: 0)

Top