Competitive Pokémon

Competitive Pokémon battles. What formats do you play the most/like the best? What do you like or dislike about competitive Pokémon in general? What strategies do you usually employ in your teams? What are some of your favourite mons/sets?

I haven't played in ages. I dropped out sometime during Gen 7 and ended up just playing Gen 1 random battle mostly until finally just giving up. Before that, I'd been enjoying Gen 6 doubles quite a bit, even if I wasn't particularly good. I'd post my team from then, but I don't feel like digging through my old backups now to find it. Kind of tempted to get back into things, but alas. If I did, I'd probably just end up going into Gen 1 OU, even though it's a very dumb (but fun) format. Also, playing on cartridge is torture, so I pretty much never bothered to actually grind up a team.

>>7204 Gen 6-7 wasn't really 'ages' ago, was it? What other gens were you active during? Now that you mention it, I haven't really played gen 1 on Showdown. Always assumed it, the format, to be awful due to the prevalence of psychic mons like Slowbro. I'm also interested in gen 2. I like that all stats can be maxed in these early games, because it's much easier to go mixed there. I like to play on a popular fangame called pokemmo rather than showdown most of the time (gen 5 meta, with a lot of modifications). It's quite good overall, imo.

>>7188 I enjoy messing around with my personal favs on Showdown and watching content related to comp, but I have never gotten seriously into it. I've considered doing so, but the knowledge barrier is *just* a bit too big relative to my interest. >What formats do you play the most/like the best? I play Smogon singles because it's what I'm familiar with. Mostly NatDex because screw Dexit. I'm mega salty that they got rid of NatDex AG, what on Earth were they thinking? I also enjoy meme formats like 1v1, Mix and Mega, and Balanced Hackmons. >What do you like or dislike about competitive Pokémon in general? RNG is the biggest thing I hate, it's the other main reason I can't take Pokémon competitively seriously. Also, this might be a controversial opinion, but I really dislike how stuff like held items and EV spreads of the opponent aren't known to you. In my opinion, competitive games are best when both sides are fully aware of what the other capable of. Take TF2 for example. When you run into a player on the other team, you know from looking at their class and loadout how damage they can do, how mobile they are, how much damage you need to deal to kill them, etc. In Pokémon, you often don't know if your Pokémon will outspeed the other, or if they have a coverage move that can knock you out. There's also the issue of how many Pokémon are unviable, which is pretty lame when it's the case for one of your favorites, but I don't hold that against Pokémon. It's pretty much impossible to make every Pokémon competitively relevant. >What strategies do you usually employ in your teams? Offensive, sometimes with some defensive mons. Never full stall. >What are some of your favourite mons/sets? https://pastebin.com/dqE5q4PF

>>7188 >format I recently fell in love with draft league. i started my first 2 and im in the playoffs for both. im 7-1 in matches so far in one of them. one is paldea dex and one is nat dex. not sure which i prefer, leaning towards natdex. >like/dislike like the abundance of complexity. dislike rng >strats my fav archetype is probs bulky offense. pokemon that can take a hit and fire back have always been my faves. in one of the leagues im using a gholdengo hazard stack roster and its quite good. In gen 6 i came up with a strat using jirachi's signature move doom desire. you DD, then uturn into a dragon and threaten a powerful dragon move like draco or outrage. this baits in their fairy (mostly clefable) and it dies to the doom desire. you have to make sure to run ground/fire coverage for heatran/ferro. >mons/sets ive been loving 3moves+sub+lefties. especially on bulky mons whos subs can sometimes live a hit. the game is soo much eaiser when you can remove the need to predict. just sub on the forced switch and then get your free hit after knowing what they sent out. add status immunity on top and its like christmas morning. ive done it recently with azu, kleavor, and walking wake.

>>7188 I've always thought that pokemon pvp was really time-consuming and repetitive. I would probably do it if there were some way to instantly set all the pokemon on my team to max level with the stat increases distributed the way I want. That would basically eliminate the whole EV training step which is the biggest reason I don't do pokemon pvp.

>>7334 I'd rather just play a fighting game or a strategy game. Nothing about Pokemon PvP strikes me as even remotely fair or competitive. It's just an appalling time sink.

>>7335 I like the turn-based strategy part of it. I have really bad eyesight so I can't really play fighting games competitively. With the amount of time it takes to train a team, I'm just surprised there are more than a few people in pokemon multiplayer. Am I just missing some tool which makes it quicker to EV train a team for PVP?

>>7336 >Am I just missing some tool which makes it quicker to EV train a team for PVP? Lol I'm actually working on a replacement right now... But there is a tool, it's called PKHeX. Unfortunately, the maintainer decided that cheating is bad so he ended up secretly adding in a flag that got people derezzed, which has severely hurt the competitive scene.

>>7337 >secretly adding a flag I hope he got paid by gamefreak at least 10,000 USD to do that. Anything less would just be dumb. I found a repo on Github: https://github.com/kwsch/PKHeX Is this it? If all the source code is here it seems like it would be fairly trivial to remove whatever flag is in there to make the use of the tool undetectable. Then fork it under a name like "Better not-broken PKHeX that is actually useful"

Pokken is how I like my competitive pokemon games to be like...

>>7355 it's a pretty solid fighting game yeah :)