Project OU Player of the Week #29: Bad Ass

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Welcome to OU's Player of the week, a project where I interview well known players to gain insight on how they battle, as well as get to know some things about them. The goal of this thread is to have these high level players give insight to other players in this community in hopes of creating a better overall experience in the OU environment. As always, if there's someone you'd like to see interviewed, feel free to shoot me a PM. So without further ado, lets get to it! Yes, this was late. However, there is a legit reason for this, so don't worry about it.

Bad Ass​

Most Known For: Winning Grand Slam II, a piece of the US East megatron, won SPL with the Classiest, general lower-tier destruction.

Favorite Pokemon: Flaaffy

Most used Pokemon: Tyranitar

Where did you get your name from?
My friend General Empoleon came on to Shoddy Battle one day with a self professed bad ass nickname. This triggered a natural response in my impressionable 12 year old mind and I immediately logged back in with my name. Somehow, out of the dozens of usernames I'd tried by that point I decided that this was the pinnacle, that my username-dom had reached its unequivocal peak with the nickname Bad Ass. So it stuck.

How and when did you get into competitive battling?
Like most everyone, I enjoyed the cart games a little bit too much. I made an account called GarchompHata on Serebii back in 2008, almost exactly 7 years ago.

How do you feel about how ORAS plays compared to XY?
I like the function of the new megas in ORAS. They give you the tools to bust through the opposition. In XY, everything was just so BALANCED. Everyone was just switching around dealing chip damage and burns until one team eventually lost a key member and succumbed. Those stall teams that pretty much sat around for 150+ turns to win games are also gone, thank god. In ORAS, though, you can't win playing that passive bullshit. Have fun letting SR chip my team with your double switches while I maneuver you to keep taking hits from a M-Metagross or LO Alakazam or M-Altaria...

I think that makes for a MUCH better metagame. I think Game Freak managed to balance out a lot of things with ORAS and struck a fantastic balance between threats being very powerful and pressuring and the tools that teams have to slow them down. So for example, you have mixed M-Metagross, a Pokemon that on paper puts the momentum in your hands almost always. However, an aggressive player can keep it tamped down until late game by not giving an opening to mega evolve, by carrying a Rocky Helmet guy like Skarmory or Garchomp, can try to Pursuit it with a ScarfTar. But at the same time, if you constantly let your opponent pull double switches into Metagross on your Clefable, it has the potential to break through for you rather nicely.

And that is the core of why I like ORAS. There is enough power that the skilled player has, bad teams notwithstanding, the room to outplay but the power creep isn't so much that the skill is mitigated by goodstuffs spamming. It promotes skill!

To add onto the above, thoughts on the team matchup issue?
Small but present. Should be taken care of in teambuilding, you should always have a strategy against every archetype and if you auto-lose to one and go into a battle knowing that, don't complain about it. You're bad. Of course it isn't possible to cover every threat but by playing proactively and keeping momentum you shouldn't let too much set up.

What are your thoughts on the Aegislash suspect test currently going on? What about the proposed King's Shield Ban?
Aegislash with King's Shield is one of the most hilariously uncompetitive concepts for a Pokemon that has ever existed. The amount of skill-less 50/50s you are nearly guaranteed to cause with King's Shield is hair tearingly frustrating. Banning moves leads to precedent to ban more moves, even if King's Shield is relatively unique we should never ban moves to make Pokemon more viable.

And I haven't read the proposal, but if it is a blanket King's Shield ban then that's just abusing a loophole considering only Aegislash uses it.

What's your favorite playstyle and why?
The style I like to use most is balanced offense, but the style I think is the best is stall. I like to use balanced offense because I have room to work around other threats (usually by virtue of good resistances and immunities rather than hard counters) and then I can put the slam on with some strong sweepers or good offensive synergy.

However if I was actually good at this game I'd play stall. Stall should never just be surviving a little bit longer than the opponent; stall is a dominating playstyle. You need to know your team inside and out (and I'm really thinking more of DPP for this whole thing), play a hundred matches with it against every playstyle. Never be surprised and have to react to your opponent, but rather use your deep metagame knowledge to hard predict what unrevealed they'd send out after you see only 2 Pokemon. Get the hazards up and then step on the throat of any attempt at comeback. A well played stall team is the epitome of skill in the game and utterly gorgeous.

What's your favorite generation of OU and why?
ADV is the most balanced and skill-promoting but I never played it enough to get deep into metagame tricks. One dude who did was/is Triangles. He is a great example of how ADV players can maximize winning chances and the chances that their predictions work out.

My personal favorite is DP though. I grew up with it and I kind of prefer the vaguely overpowered stuff in the tier (mostly because of no team preview). Gently finessing double switches and piling up seemingly insignificant chip damage on a Swampert to set up a DD Mence sweep in ADV is a very pretty thing, but there's nothing like pulling out something as ridiculously powerful as a MixApe on a free switch and asking yourself what the other guy's more likely to sacrifice.

How do you go about preparing for tournament matches? Does the process differ depending on the tournament?
I get nerves when the game starts which severely cloud my judgment so I try to cut that down any way I can. Jerk off, smoke a cigarette, walk around for a few minutes, warm up games. Whatever I'm feeling. I also like to listen to the song Shit Luck by Modest Mouse before I play important sets so I don't have any shit luck.

Favorites to win OST and Smogon Tour?
I'll take BKC for OST because I feel like he is a very good player and if he gets some good teams going (not gimmick stuff like CG Altaria + Tyrantrum + Gatr....) he's real hard to beat.

I'm taking Smogon Tour. Inevitably failing that, Heist is my favorite. PDC has shown massive improvement in the last year and I would not be surprised if he made a run to semifinals or beyond. SoulWind can be clinically precise with his plays when he's on point, expect him, and I always think Leftiez has a good shot
Thoughts on the newly introduced Smogon Classic? Favorite to win?
A big name, almost certainly. I reckon it'll be impossible to slip into finals of that unless you really know what you're doing. BKC stands out as a favorite, he's so fucking good across a lot of tiers.

If you could change one thing about OU, what would it be and why?
Ban Landorus-I. He provides instant offense that is a little bit too strong and, frankly, it is pretty hard to justify not using him on a team (IMO). Whenever Landorus enters the field, no matter how the momentum was hanging earlier, it is now in favor of the Landorus user. He forces you to react to him which usually promotes skill (they have to outplay to get him in, you have to outplay to leave no room), but in the case of Landorus it is just impossible to fit enough pressure on your team to not let him in (two immunities, immune to Spikes), and once he's in something's going to die.

Do you have any advice for newer players for playing, and for Smogon in general?
Think. You're playing a real human being so a large part of prediction is psychology. If you look at your replays and seriously analyze each turn, think about why you made your move and if it worked why it did and if it didn't why it didn't. Create long term game plans; no play you should make should EVER just be "just because". You need to have a goal to work toward, big or small, that will end in you winning the game. Stop making ultimately useless double switches, chart out your risk/reward. When you get deep enough into it, individual Pokemon are meaningless. There are roles to fill for each team, there are careful connections between Pokemon (what you'd call synergy). Most people, when they make a 'good team' just stumble upon something that satisfies these connections and works well together. TL;DR think about overarching patterns in players and do lots of analysis :^). Also if you're new prepare not to be good until you have memorized a disgusting number of statistics and calculations.

If you could change one thing about Smogon as a whole to make it better, what would it be and why?
Smogon is simultaneously a fantastic community and a cesspool. I love the ridiculous variance in cool people here but I hate the memetic aspect of cliques and parroting. The Style clusterfuck was pretty weird too.

However, the one thing that I would really like to change would be the prevalence of "teamplay". It's fucking everywhere now! A lot of players believe it to just be something that cuts down on the silly mistakes you make in a match. But the match is YOUR match! If you make a silly mistake, you don't DESERVE to win the game! I think this is a large part of the devaluing of trophies (at least in my eyes). I don't think anyone has any doubt that Loki's trophies came from him whooping ass, not him and a couple of his friends and a few dudes who hopped on his bandwagon and......

"Teamplay" is ghosting. It is cheating, and it makes players' wins not match up to their skill. Please don't do it :[

What players do you look up to / are good friends with?
Heist has an utterly brilliant approach to the game. He is the progenitor of the aforementioned playing as if each turn was exactly as important as the other. Also a generally hilarious guy to be around. Triangles is similarly clinical with his optimization. BKC is a tough nut to crack with his defensive teams and has great (though twisted) music taste and generally awesome personality. Modest Mouse rules. I'll shout out Danilo for being one of the coolest nigs on the site (his vitriol gives me frequent and turgid erections), Floppy for being real AF in any category you wanna go for, Gouki for supporting me in my smogon tour semifinal run when I was 13, dice for being my shoulder and blightbringer for zhabrimba es lallia fara i wakasawa (he'll know what i mean)

Finally, can you provide us a team that's a good fit for this metagame and reflects your playstyle, with a brief explanation of how it works?

Hide

Alakazam @ Life Orb
Ability: Magic Guard
EVs: 16 Def / 240 SpA / 252 Spe
Timid Nature
IVs: 0 Atk
- Psychic
- Focus Blast
- Shadow Ball
- Encore

Hippowdon @ Leftovers
Ability: Sand Stream
EVs: 248 HP / 112 Def / 148 SpD
Impish Nature
- Earthquake
- Toxic
- Slack Off
- Stealth Rock

Latias (Latias-Mega) (F) @ Latiasite
Ability: Levitate
EVs: 248 HP / 216 Def / 44 Spe
Bold Nature
- Recover
- Hidden Power [Fire]
- Ice Beam
- Psyshock

Clefable @ Leftovers
Ability: Magic Guard
EVs: 252 HP / 156 Def / 96 SpD / 4 Spe
Calm Nature
IVs: 0 Atk
- Moonblast
- Knock Off
- Soft-Boiled
- Calm Mind

Ferrothorn @ Leftovers
Ability: Iron Barbs
EVs: 248 HP / 8 Def / 252 SpD
Relaxed Nature
IVs: 0 Spe
- Gyro Ball
- Power Whip
- Leech Seed
- Spikes

Heatran @ Leftovers
Ability: Flash Fire
EVs: 4 HP / 252 SpA / 252 Spe
Timid Nature
IVs: 30 Atk / 30 Def
- Flash Cannon
- Fire Blast
- Earth Power
- Taunt

Allows me to cover all threats very, very well as well as put a lot of pressure on my opponent with Spikes + SR, Taunt Heatran, and especially Life Orb Alakazam, all the while the opponent has to make sure their CM Clefable counters don't get worn down. Spikes Ferrothorn is absolutely essential because it allows you to dictate the course of the game (either they try really hard to get in their defogger or they keep eating Spikes), and you can take advantage of that. LO Zam is an amazing cleaner. Kind of has trouble with SD Roost Mega Scizor because Heatran will get really worn down and it'l sweep you if you're not careful. Gotta play this aggressively or else the other person is going to overwhelm you, but that is the beauty of ORAS. You have a good team, you need to play it well to apply the pressure. This is a great example of a team that rewards skill.

Ask me questions of theory on the game (which I think a lot about), my life, music, that time I donked Floppy, whatever, man.

"I catch dinosaurs, make love to Elizabeth Taylor..."

---

As always, leave any questions you have for Bad Ass down below. See you next week!

 

[Reverb]

Do you miss #nowhere?

 

[I AM THE JAMAICAN BOBSLED TEAM]

is cofagrigus viable on stall teams because lol how else do they beat guts facade heracross(adamant)

 

[Lavos]

do you think stall's place in the ou metagame has significantly strengthened/weakened in the past two generations? is team preview a sufficient counterbalance to the growing number of viable offensive threats? is there a "perfect" stall or does every stall lose to x+y+z?

 

[Mur]

I really like your thought process with the game:]

Anyways can you give your thought process from the beginning of a turn to the end? I think it would be interesting to hear what you analyze first/last, what you prioritize in a situation where you have a few different "good" plays to choose from etc etc.

 

[brokenwings]

​

However if I was actually good at this game I'd play stall. Stall should never just be surviving a little bit longer than the opponent; stall is a dominating playstyle. You need to know your team inside and out (and I'm really thinking more of DPP for this whole thing), play a hundred matches with it against every playstyle. Never be surprised and have to react to your opponent, but rather use your deep metagame knowledge to hard predict what unrevealed they'd send out after you see only 2 Pokemon. Get the hazards up and then step on the throat of any attempt at comeback. A well played stall team is the epitome of skill in the game and utterly gorgeous.

Would you happen to have any replays or logs that show examples of teams like this being used in the way you described?

 

[Soulz]

If you can have a pokemon IRL what would it be besides Flaaffy. :]

 

[g]

Er what musical genre are you into the most these days?
Are you an hip hop guy too?
How did you get into the music you listen? Do you attend live events?
Favorite lower tier?

 

[Sunchipps]

What are your thoughts on Lando-I

 

[watashi]

what's your theory on the game

why do you play like you do

 

[Taliheim]

Could you elaborate why you decided to forgo hazard removal entirely on your sample team, for those who don't really understand the reasoning behind it? It can be confusing at first glance.

Let's say Game Freak charged you with creating a brand new Pokemon for OR/AS (let's assume as an event release), thus giving you the chance to add a niche that you think the metagame needs. What would you choose to try and make it do?

How do you think OR/AS would function if it lacked Team Preview?

 

[Bad Ass]

Do you miss #nowhere?

absolutely, man. fucking around on irc when i was 13-15 are just some fantastic and endearing memories for me.

is cofagrigus viable on stall teams because lol how else do they beat guts facade heracross(adamant)

no idea what tier sd facade hera and cofagrigus are both viable. bw uu? in which case i really like gligar, as well as Aggressive Play.

do you think stall's place in the ou metagame has significantly strengthened/weakened in the past two generations? is team preview a sufficient counterbalance to the growing number of viable offensive threats? is there a "perfect" stall or does every stall lose to x+y+z?

stall is much better in DP. team preview is kind of a moot point i think, because at the best level of DP players can quite accurately assume what the other guy is packing 3, 5, 10 turns in. that's a massive part of the skill of DP and a really important skill to playing stall. knowing exactly what the opponent CAN do allows you to evaluate the best of his options and act accordingly. problem is, in BW and ORAS you just got stuff that's so strong it can pressure you even if you know it is coming; even tons of passive damage on balance with poison damage, leech seed, knock off + sand, hazards, etc.

there is no perfect stall, a well built offense team piloted by a really heads up player should overcome it unless the stall player is playing out of his mind. this is because a well built offense team should make sure that from turn 1 it is not ceding free turns to stall, ever, and a good player will continue that momentum.

I really like your thought process with the game:]
Anyways can you give your thought process from the beginning of a turn to the end? I think it would be interesting to hear what you analyze first/last, what you prioritize in a situation where you have a few different "good" plays to choose from etc etc.

at team preview, i assess win conditions first on both sides and formulate how i'm going to win the game and stymie any plots the opponent is planning; as well as threats i want to make sacrifices to take out, non-threats, the whole board. itemize each pokemon's importance, figure out their plan. then assess lead matchup in terms of how i'm going about the game. always look for win/wins, always maximize your odds. never lead with something keldeo weak, IMO, because letting keldeo get a free scald on your latios / amoonguss / tangrowth / whatever is NOT maximizing your odds. never give your opponent the opportunity to put you in a position where he can play you or take advantage of you.

when i have a few good plays i just play the game as my opponent. if they have a move which covers a majority of my reasonable options quite well, you can assume they will take it. maximize from your opponent's eye balls.

Would you happen to have any replays or logs that show examples of teams like this being used in the way you described?

http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-ou-53816

notice how soulwind immediately sees that his path to victory is heavy pressure with alakazam and he goes deep for; imagine if he only tried to get in zam on a revenge KO or something.

i still think heist played that one fantastically with his zam weak being so bad. a few speed EVs away from winning...

If you can have a pokemon IRL what would it be besides Flaaffy. :]

for pure practicality, a dragonite. man i bet those motherfuckers are comfortable to sleep on.

Er what musical genre are you into the most these days?
Are you an hip hop guy too?
How did you get into the music you listen? Do you attend live events?
Favorite lower tier?

amateur-y stuff, not necessarily underproduced but just people who want to make music and so they do it because that's how they do it. maybe a little rough maybe not, produced by some dudes doing their thing. that's the key. i just wanna listen to people who are doing their thing. MINUTEMEN [my idols] especially shitty live ripped VCRs on youtube, bobby dylan, coltrane, walking around campus with tago mago day tripping on a saturday, lots of early modest mouse and bootlegs, hendrix, miles davis, neu!, mountain goats, tortoise, pixies, television, morrissey in your ear at three am, all seventeen minutes of sister ray.

i like hip hop too i like all music. it has not been a genre of my scrutiny like kraut or punk were and so i can not go deeper than what most people should know by virtue of being music fans. but i think the characters are very interesting albeit commercialized in some cases (especially popular rap but don't tell me legends like big/pac aren't selling images too).

i got into the music i listen to by writing down the names of top 40 songs they played on my school bus in 2008. which somehow led to rateyourmusic.com and years upon years of downloading sketchy .rar files at 65 kilobytes per second. i feel the anticipation made me crave each note of each album and so i used to be a much better music listener.

i like live events, i like festivals. i went to a fest with pixies and old baldy can still scream with the best of them. joey santiago did a five minute mental explosion of feedback and white noise and loops with vamos, but they didn't do the YOU FUCKING DIE intro. there was a lot of surfer rosa. death from above 1979 was there and they were legitimately one of the best, most intense live acts i have ever witnessed. the sounds that came off that stage were astral. i saw a marching band called marchfourth at a festival and it was raining so everyone took their shirts off and danced in the mud while they played a horn cover of nirvana's "in bloom".

hardcore shows are fucking fun as shit, nothing like a night of getting together with other frustrated, stunted kids at the masquerade in atlanta and mindlessly falling over each other for a few precious hours

my favorite lower tier is, obligatorily, dp uu. so many fond memories, fond friendships past, uncaring love for the game. even without my nostalgia trip i believe it was one of the most skill-promoting games that ever existed!

What are your thoughts on Lando-I

extremely overpowered. makes it far too easy to nab KOs and swing the game against balance and rock polish up and outright take games against offense builds. hard as fuck to wear down, great resistances and immunities, utterly perfect coverage, fast. unless your entire team is landorus-proofed it is almost guaranteed to get in and once it is in it will VERY likely get a KO.

 

[radianthero156]

this player is both Bad and Ass.

opinion on the aegislash suspect test?

what's your general opinion on lower tiers? do you think they should be valued more? (for instance, making one of the 2 annual smogon tours be uu/ou/uber)

how do you build teams?

 

[tegrof19]

What hand do you write / jack off with

FOR SCIENCE

 

[Tesung]

What do you think is the likelihood of a first timer in playoffs winning tour?

How do you think teamplay/ghosting/whatever you wanna call it can be stopped?

Do you think that balance is the best in current Oras?

Do you still get nerves before big games?

Do you think making objectively bad or extremely risky plays can be worth it if it controls the pace of the game?

Do you think building or playing takes more skill?

What do you think separates the best from the just good?


I like your thought process on the game, the tier, etc, especially the part about XY being too balanced (hf breaking venutran/spdef gliscor shit or w.e). Your ideas about psychological pattterns are very interesting, and something I and most others do subconciously. Do you think there is a good way to minimize your own patterns, or do you think that type of overthinking isnt worth it?

 

[Bad Ass]

what's your theory on the game

why do you play like you do

i liken my theory on the game to platonic forms. there is a perfect player; a player who has simply played so many matches and understands human psychology SO MUCH that he can play perfectly an entire game (or as perfectly as one can when one takes into account the unexpected, although the perfect player also thinks of minimizing luck), as well as be able to analyze metagames to find patterns previously unnoticed. however, also like plato, i believe that some arts are simply too in-depth to be able to master perfectly and therefore that practically there will never be a player with a win rate of 100% (or as close as you can get to that with luck).

The perfect player is always aware of what we instinctively call the ebb and flow of the game. i am sure that if you played thousands and thousands of games and deeply analyzed each one you would begin to understand the good positions we get ourselves into with a team and the bad positions and EXACTLY the kind of series of moves that lead us there. that sounds like a lot of brute force memorization and is rather like chess. if you see a certain opening, or a certain set of moves in the midgame after a given opening, you can reasonably predict how good of a situation you are in. this is why practice is so important because it allows you to understand how you maneuver yourself into different positions. most people handle this instinctively, playing a few turns ahead. this will lead to you unwittingly putting yourself in a bad spot.

the key of winning games consistently lies in two things: forward thinking and expansive thinking. if you can think far enough ahead and wide enough you will see every option your opponent has each turn and where those options lead. just pick a good one and you should win if you execute as you did in your head properly. what prevents All People from doing that is there are too many factors to predict with any exactness the next, say, 25 turns.

Could you elaborate why you decided to forgo hazard removal entirely on your sample team, for those who don't really understand the reasoning behind it? It can be confusing at first glance.

Let's say Game Freak charged you with creating a brand new Pokemon for OR/AS (let's assume as an event release), thus giving you the chance to add a niche that you think the metagame needs. What would you choose to try and make it do?

How do you think OR/AS would function if it lacked Team Preview?

alakazam + clefable + latias don't take hazard damage.

if you're setting up spikes on me with your ferrothorn or skarmory, i'll trade layers right down with you with my own ferrothorn.

i'll take my odds with even three layers + sr when i have an extremely threatening alakazam, phazing, and a good defensive core that isn't immediately fucked by spikes.

i'm not near good enough at that kind of balancing theory to create something without ruining the metagame. maybe a mixed attacker with high speed and medium-low attacking stats, decent bulk, really in the vein of mixed jirachi in DP but faster. could really tear apart balanced teams, not sure i could make it powerful enough to not get walled to shit without making it too powerful. ghost/dark 120 speed, 110 attacking stats, 80/90/90 bulk, shadow ball/knock off/focus blast/wisp/destiny bond/sludge wave/thunderbolt/taunt/superpower; really like gengar that can splash on superpower+knock off, outspeeds scarftar and starmie, and doesn't die to pursuit.

oras would be very uncompetitive because of how many ridiculous threats there are. imagine your opponent pulling out a surprise rp landorus end game...

this player is both Bad and Ass.

opinion on the aegislash suspect test?

what's your general opinion on lower tiers? do you think they should be valued more? (for instance, making one of the 2 annual smogon tours be uu/ou/uber)

how do you build teams?

this is in the OP; aegislash is utterly uncompetitive and shouldn't have been retested.

i love lower tiers because they have given me most of my fame, but if we're being honest they are really worth less to be good at. the playerbases are much smaller. that's really cool when you form communities of friends fucking around in the tier; it usually adds a lot of competition to the tier if the main cliques of a tier are very good at the game and you make fantastic friends. however, if they aren't good then the tier will become a circlejerk of the 20-25 people who even remotely know what they're doing. and a lot of tiers, despite there being cool people playing them, just aren't going to give you anywhere near as much competition because anyone who knows heads from tails in the metagame can be played really easy. that's why you get dudes who are just good at the game coming in and taking souls.

still, if the tierlist naturally balances out to be fun then good players will flock to it and you won't have that problem (see: dp uu). as for adding them into tour, i really like the system they have now. i hear ubers is really just terrible and i think it's hard to argue to remove just one tier for uu. despite what people saw BW is pretty alright although reuniclus and alakazam are really lame. i think you'd need to have a really really good set of UU + Ubers (better, more fleshed out than DP + BW) to consider it. also, fuck equal opportunity, if your tier sucks it doesn't DESERVE to get put in any tournament (not a jab at LC, because i supported LC when they tried to push it in SPL. this applies to all tiers).

i build my teams with my main win condition in mind, all along the way playing out situations in my head of team members i have and making sure that i have a lot of auxiliary ways to win and that any clever stops my opponent could think of to the team can be taken care of. think what positions your team members may be put in, think what pokemon could give you trouble. it's hard to make a team that has real synergy, all members of the team are breaking down counters for other dudes while not allowing free turns. that's where playing matches in your head comes in and noticing patterns in gameplay, and THAT requires ridiculous amounts of practice to do really well.

alternatively you can just ask yourself what is popular and ask what set of threats, what defensive core, etc. plows through it. people spamming sand + spikes in BW? maybe you should try nasty plot pass or something. so tl;dr, the obvious answer: find a threat that's good in the metagame and support it lol

What hand do you write / jack off with

FOR SCIENCE

i write with my right hand and i can masturbate ambidextrously.

 

[CagedWisdom42]

Best Modest Mouse song? And why is it either Make Everyone Happy/Mechanical Birds or Edit the Sad Parts? Or Life Like Weeds. Fuckin love Modest Mouse.

 

[Bad Ass]

What do you think is the likelihood of a first timer in playoffs winning tour?

How do you think teamplay/ghosting/whatever you wanna call it can be stopped?

Do you think that balance is the best in current Oras?

Do you still get nerves before big games?

Do you think making objectively bad or extremely risky plays can be worth it if it controls the pace of the game?

Do you think building or playing takes more skill?

What do you think separates the best from the just good?


I like your thought process on the game, the tier, etc, especially the part about XY being too balanced (hf breaking venutran/spdef gliscor shit or w.e). Your ideas about psychological pattterns are very interesting, and something I and most others do subconciously. Do you think there is a good way to minimize your own patterns, or do you think that type of overthinking isnt worth it?

only someone of the highest caliber, a prodigy, unmatched skill at the game could win tour as a new player. oh, he would also have to be very, very handsome too /s

no but really it's hard as shit to know all the little tricks that you need in in tour tiers because they come from intimate familiarity with the tier. also depends on if you make your own teams and if you can't, now good the teams provided to you are

ghosting can't really be stopped. what are you going to do, check irc idle times during matches and punish based on speculation? even then, just move to fucking skype or something. the only way it can be stopped is if players gather enough of a sense of pride to not want their victories to be tainted.

balance with some Strong shit to push through other people's defensive cores is always a good playstyle. allows you to not make offense dittos a game of who can sacrifice best, still have tools to break up stall teams.

i still get very nervous before big games. i tell myself that fear cuts deeper than swords but it don't work. the worst part is that when i am nervous i cannot think ahead very far and i end up playing on autopilot, which is bad.

well i think that an objectively bad play is never good because it is....objectively bad. however, if you really mean to say whether it is ok to make plays that have a bonked risk/reward ratio for the sake of keeping an advantage, i'd usually say no. always look for the play with the highest ratio of reward to risk; just take a second and place yourself in your opponent's situation! however, if you become typecast into always looking for optimal plays or that is a big part of your style, you will get played like a piano. so yeah, sometimes you have to take a big swing to keep the opponent on their toes. that's a really bad answer which boils down to "it depends".

i said that i do think that there is a perfect player, but that is in abstract. a person with a perfect grasp of the human mind. in practice it is impossible for a perfect player to exist. no player can win, even disregarding luck, every game. you can have a play that covers all of someone's reasonable options and the opponent can still, on any given turn, make a seemingly awful play that works perfectly. the fact of the matter is that without BEING your opponent you can never ever make a 100% accurate prediction. the game can never be boiled down to an exact science (which bothers me). so generally, yes, maximize your winning percentage. but sometimes man, you just gotta go on that old fashioned instinct.

building takes more skill because you have to play tons of matches, often with all the little changes in auxiliary pokemon (in dp: stall teams can run random things like Clefable or scarftar or nidoqueen or lo aero cleaner and you have to be aware of those matchups). a good team builder can play out entire realistic games in the mind AND adjust a team to better those matchups whole retaining leeway against all the other ones. extremely hard to do consistently well.

what separates the best from the good is not functioning entirely off of that good old fashioned instinct. it is necessary, but realizing the theory of why we do what we do (even if more subconsciously understanding) is important.

minimize your patterns by not creating patterns. don't be known for a certain team style, or being overly aggressive, or being overly safe. it's hard not to develop some kind of style because if a type of play makes sense to you in one game, it's really likely that similar types of posts will appeal to you in other games. you just have to fight habit and always think of your toes. NO AUTOPILOT!

Best Modest Mouse song? And why is it either Make Everyone Happy/Mechanical Birds or Edit the Sad Parts? Or Life Like Weeds. Fuckin love Modest Mouse.

I love mm. I'm at a very boring and long event so I'll make a list of modest mouse things I love.

guitar solo of mechanical birds when it gets really high pitched is fucking awesome

kick drum on interstate 8. I can never predict it.

"the custom concern for the people... "

the opening to teeth like God's shoeshine like god damn man has there ever been a better opener to a song or album?

RIGHT WING LEFT WING CHICKEN WING!

I love the little melody on path of least resistance.

" as fruit drops, flesh it sinks; it all will fall, fall right into place "

love the interstate 8 metaphor as a whole. working hard to buy gas to drive around on an interstate that leads us around in a figure 8. I'm going nowhere but I'm guaranteed to be late...

other people's lives is the best song in existence I love when he mentions the bow legs and peg legs in the whispered tone and it's cool how that shows up on beach side property too

on truckers atlas the lyrics are really subtly different in between verses. in the first one it's "start at the northwest corner" and the second one it's "you start at the northwest corner" and a few other similar things the which sounds really insignificant. but I have sung that song a hundred times and it feels good when I remember those little parts.

when I play cowboy dan on guitar I don't have a whammy but I'll still bend the shit out of that chord when he's says CAN'T DO IT NOT EVEN IF SOBER!

and I always thought the guitar chords on the novocaine stain version from interstate 8 sounded fragile and yet entirely free

whenever I breathe out, you're breathing in is beautiful, especially the crazy ass tremolo bends. I listened to that song driving with my girlfriend one night and I like that memory.

turning volume up as loud as it will go in my car and playing shit luck when I'm feeling useless

there's so much beauty it could make you cry....

I have to oil my guitar strings to play the fucking fast climax to doing the cockroach but it sounds really good


ask more questions if you guys would like. I love validating my years spent on this website / this planet by feigning some great wisdom or sharing my life.

 

[mael]

When you build a team for a metagame which you haven't played in a long time/that has changed a lot since you last played it, how do you build your team?

How do you practize for important games, if at all? Do you use the ladder? Please explain why.

Do you try and force creativity while teambuilding? Like if you lack really good ideas, would you rather build around a probably bad idea or go standard?

Do you only use selfmade teams in tournaments? It is kind of a trend to use other peoples teams and be successful with it. What do you think about that? Does a win lose value if it wasn't with a selfmade team?

 

[Enki]

Thoughts on:
Spiritualized - I think I'm in Love?

 

[Clone]

On a scale of not caring to 'what is school', how bad was your senioritis?

If you could say one thing directly to haunter about why Landorus should be banned, what would it be?

Will you play for WCoP this year? If so, what tier?

What is an acceptable replay to send on for tryouts?

 

[Croven]

what is the best way to stop "thinking you've won" and being too hasty, ultimately leading to a choke? i usually start out battles by thinking long term about the gameplan, but as i start to play i go autopilot and make questionable plays while not thinking long term. best way to stop this?

what are your other hobbies outside of pokemon?