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All Aboard the TornShifu Train!
Being lost, as lost as one could be, I copied a meta team
from Yang Chieh-Lun's that got all the hype at the moment. Wolfe Glick used it
in an online tournament and it was simultaneously highlighted by NeilVGC on his
Youtube channel. I played around a hundred games with this team and decided to
make the following small changes as part of adaptations:
I readjusted the EVs to help my team speed creep the
opponents in case they were using the same 6 from the same player.
·
Tornadus got a significantly lowered speed,
enough bulk to live Urshifu’s Surging Strikes in some cases and a mental herb
to overcome the wars of ‘who gets to taunt first’. This set was initially
developed to outgun the teams that ran a sunny day Tornadus that would
completely flip the script on me.
·
After I learned that Urshifu in rain or when
tera’d can take out a Chien Pao with its Surging Strikes, I adapted to give it
safety goggles as an added bonus to help it ignore Amoonguss.
·
Iron hands got heavy slam for the purpose of
catching a flutter mane, scoring a KO or doing a great deal of damage to
Amoonguss or Tera Fairy Cresselia.
With these minor adjustments I stumbled upon one of the most
useful tools I have used up to this point that made me progress in VGC. It was
Bauerdad’s PASRS which stands for Palkia Academy Showdown Reporting
Spreadsheet.
It is a truly fantastic google spreadsheets tool that will
provide you with move usage statistics, your matches, the mons your opponents
used and you have used, the tera type used and whether the battles were OTS or
not. I took some games seriously with this tool and was able to tackle my way
into the 1500s. However this team was not the final one we will be discussing
here.
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Craving Some Fish
So why exactly Basculegion? I have been focusing my teams
more in the terms of which ones are my favorites from the bunch. In series 1 I
tried to build with mons that fascinated me. In series two I narrowed down my
focus on Great Tusk, Series 3 was there to show my love for Chein Pao and now
in this series I want to try out one of my new favorites, Basculegion. What’s
great is that rain is quickly being established as one of the new emerging, as
effective for an archetype as can be top cutting the most recent online tours.
Before I start I needed to establish with myself that I
could benefit from using some nifty tricks that give me an edge in the matchups
that I play. After all my only way to test the effectiveness of this team is
through the showdown ladder and not all battles can be guaranteed an OTS
format.
In search for my Basculegion team I decided to do research.
Clearly at this point I do realize that I’m not anyway near being the best
player or the best teambuilder. Even though I love to team build from scratch,
having references to start off with is much less daunting.
The teams that I gathered from the VGC Pastes Repository I found
that the Basculegion rain teams seem to follow the following format:
·
Rain Mode (Basculegion and Pelliper)
·
Grass Type (Rillaboom or Amoonguss)
·
Electric Type (Thundurus, Regielecki or rarely
Iron Hands) OR Chien Pao.
·
Special Attacker (Flutter Mane or Gholdengo)
·
Bulky Mon (H Goodra, H Arcanine, Ursaluna) OR
Dragonite
To test the archetype I took to VGC pastes repository and
found a team under the title of PurpleRain. While testing in my first 12
matches using the aforementioned amazing PASRS tool, I figured the trick room
matchup was unwinnable in most ways. Particularly the Armordeedee ones where
they had Hatterene and then again Amoonguss was not the best counter of the
Cresselia + Ursaluna combo either.
An idea struck once again, when I was playing with the
standard Urshifu team a while back the lead of a Rillaboom with Farigaraf
completely dominated me, having played this sort of a team when I build a rain
team with TR mode, I felt comfortable enough to go with the pairing of the
aforementioned two, especially as Rillaboom variants are quite effective with
rain combinations. Now I had a direction to make something unique out of this
team, play something familiar (rain + trick room, Flutter mane + fake out) and
hopefully do well with it.
My first matchup was once again a trick room one, which I
instantly demolished with the pairing of Rillaboom + Farigaraf.
Following are the results of tests I Played with this team
combo: On an initial glance the combination of Farigiraf and Rillaboom seems to
turn out really well for me on this one, Flutter mane made some matches however
Thundurus was something I found no particular use for. Now is the time to put on
my teambuilder glasses and give it a proper theoretical backing.
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So for checking the team from its theory I checked down the
following marks:
|
Mons Countered |
Not Countered |
Combos to Check: |
|
Flutter Mane Urshifu Rapid Strike Tornadus Amoonguss Heatran Landorus Cresselia Rillaboom Ursaluna Chi Yu Iron Bundle Torkoal Regidrago Armarouge Moltres Galar |
Chien Pao Dragonite Tera Water Gholdengo Regielecki Hisuian Goodra Basculegion Abomasnow Zapdos Sneasler Gyarados Dozogiri Gastrodon |
Trick Room countered TornShifu countered Armordeedee countered |
From all the thinking I could do I decided to keep the
initial 5 members of this team but now add on a new last slot in place of Thundurus
which wasn’t a part of any of my previous testing; Landorus incarnate.
I played more and more games with this team putting down the
results in PASRS but it was certainly not looking very good. Particularly
because I wasn’t as familiar with the ways in which I could fully utilize my
Basculegion’s early game rain sweeping or end game last respects sweeping.
Merging the two styles of teams did not end up becoming the most promising
outcome of all, after all, I am not the best teambuilder around.
Turnback To TornShifu
I decided to backtrack and pick up with the team where I had
left off with. Once again using PASRS and a new addition in Dragapult
(replacing dragonite) I set out to extensive testing. I was steady in scoring
some early wins however issues started to surface soon.
The problems I had found with this team were that if left
unchecked or when I lose my answers to amoonguss early, it can become a pain in
the behind for my team. I faced four dondozo matchups and was forced into
running haze over protect on my chien pao after that. I was also kind of forced
into keeping ice spinner on chien pao because of the ever present and ever
annoying indeedee, which when considering I would almost always break my focus
sash in the process didn’t seem like to favorable of a trade either.
Iron hands was something I noticed was brought in to less
and less games with my progress with my real need for it being fake out
disruption or catching flutter manes with a heavy slam. The problem was once
again, that I would take a sizeable chunk of HP before I take them out which
was another questionable trade.
Defensive Water Tera needed proper managing especially when
most of my offense came from the use of Ice spinner and surging strikes. Well
played Goodras especially with fairy tera were a fortress that my team found
difficult to break through.
A New Breeze:
The four Pokemon I was consistently and effectively using
the most were my Tornshifu pairing with Chien Pao and Flutter Mane. The answers
to all my problems were clear as day, a combination of two Pokemon that had
amazing synergy with this team and were handling all those troublesome matchups
for me: Rillaboom and Heatran.
Having tested Rillaboom before I knew I could make it work
here too. Moreover I barely got some, but some useful experience with a Heatran
on an early Tornshifu team that I picked up for practice. The addition of these
two also meant that I could now free up the ice spinner slot for a more optimal
(albeit slightly innacurate) icicle crash on my Chien Pao. Having a proper
resistance to an onslaught of fairy type attacks, Ursaluna’s façade and more
surety on amoonguss was such a great feeling.
What’s funny to me is that this is yet again as a meta as a
team could get, last time I came to such a conclusion was in series two where I
built an almost exact version of an early meta team. Now that I know where each
member is coming from, I have a great perspective on how to properly EV these
two new additions. Moreover I am no longer confused on what elements it takes
to win what matchups. Now I certainly feel I can give my all during laddering.
Calcs for the EV Spread Reasoning:
|
252 SpA Tornadus Bleakwind Storm vs. 252 HP /
108 SpD Assault Vest Rillaboom: 96-114 (46.3 - 55%) -- 5.9% chance to 2HKO
after Grassy Terrain recovery 116+ SpA Protosynthesis Flutter Mane
Moonblast vs. 252 HP / 108 SpD Assault Vest Rillaboom: 84-100 (40.5 - 48.3%)
-- guaranteed 3HKO after Grassy Terrain recovery +2 252 Def Goodra-Hisui Body Press vs. 52 HP
/ 4 Def Heatran: 146-172 (84.3 - 99.4%) -- guaranteed 2HKO 52+ SpA Life Orb Heatran Flash Cannon vs. 252
HP / 0+ SpD Tera-Fairy Goodra-Hisui: 109-133 (58.2 - 71.1%) -- guaranteed
2HKO after Leftovers recovery 252 Atk Choice Band Tera-Dark Urshifu-Single
Strike Wicked Blow vs. 252 HP / 116 Def Heatran on a critical hit: 164-194
(82.8 - 97.9%) -- guaranteed 2HKO |
After a 100 more battles being input in the PASRS tool, I came
to the following few small tweaks on this team:
I decided that having taunt on flutter mane was something I’d
value a lot more over having protect, whenever
wanted to click protect with this mon, I would have either gone for a
substitute setup. Adding another layer of surety against a FigHands lead was
something important to have.
Rillaboom never really got around to using u-turn as part of
the game plans I made with this team. A team like this is designed to get
minimal positioning and then overwhelm with offense. I decided to replace it
with drum beating, a move which would be strong would give my team a bit of
speed control with no recoil that comes with wood hammer.
I also put on a little bit of speed on my Heatran to make it
out speed Chien Pao and max speed flutter manes in tailwind.
Now I might not have climbed up to my desired state of being
on the top 500 of the showdown ladder but I did break into the 1700s for a
format that I thought I was quite fairly doomed in.
The Full Team:
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