Silly idea time!

[lilith]

so i was wondering what the OU metagame would look like without tauros!

i'd expect lots and lots of mostly unchecked chansey and lots and lots of snorlax to deal with the chanseys. so, probably even less diverse than normal OU?

how about with tauros and chansey both out? i feel like this may even nerf snorlax a bit, despite similarities to tauros, because one of his main roles (killing chansey) no longer exists. i think exeggutor also suffers a bit because jynx is stronger with tauros gone and because chansey is a such a good explosion target.

would this be an interesting metagame? has it been done before / does anyone want to try it out?

inb4 100% persian & alakazam

[Agent Syrup]

I'd try it. While I do use Chancy a lot I almost never use Tauros. An alternate idea is ban unSTABed moves on Tauros ( thus Gengar and the Rock types would actually counter him). And maybe even ban hyperbeam on him for nerf sake. And perhaps on Chansey we could ban softboiled on her or give her the lowest HP EVs. But not to deter too much from what you were saying, yes I'd play a no Chansey/ no Tauros match with you.

[Crystal_]

smogon is currently running a rby tournament without normal-types, which would kinda look like what you are saying, except that snorlax (and persian, and dodrio) are also banned.

The way I see it, no Tauros means more Chansey freeze wars, more Persians and Golems and Rhydons, more resting snorlaxes and more rest in general. No Tauros and no Chansey would mean happier Starmies and happier Alakazams.

[Isa]

Basically, more stall and more boring. It'd be more interesting to ban Chansey, IMO.

[lilith]

Dec 9, 2012 3:36:31 GMT -8 Crystal_ said:

smogon is currently running a rby tournament without normal-types, which would kinda look like what you are saying, except that snorlax (and persian, and dodrio) are also banned.

i'll have to check it out!

The way I see it, no Tauros means more Chansey freeze wars, more Persians and Golems and Rhydons, more resting snorlaxes and more rest in general. No Tauros and no Chansey would mean happier Starmies and happier Alakazams.

reflect zam suffers though if people start using persian

[Zilch]

No Normal types mean that Recover users rule. I'd imagine Slowbro would be a huge pain, too, unless he's facing Electrics.

[Isa]

Without Chansey, the only reliable way to put both Starmie and Slowbro to a halt is Zapdos (and arguably Gengar). Those four would probably see quite a rise.

I'm interested to see how the meta would change if Gengar wasn't around.

[lilith]

does anyone have a team built? i want to try some games!

*pokes agentsyrup*

Dec 9, 2012 8:10:37 GMT -8 Zilch said:

No Normal types mean that Recover users rule. I'd imagine Slowbro would be a huge pain, too, unless he's facing Electrics.

hmm, i feel like i would rather use starmie / stoss zam / lapras against slowbro than get my tauros/persian paralyzed/damaged anyway. i don't really trust snorlax (barring an amnesia/thunderbolt/rest set...) coz slowbro has such a good chance to twave him before he does anything, and it seems hairy from there... although it's nice that snorlax can selfdestruct into a gengar in the bad luck cases and win in the good ones. am i just crazy here? should i be switching normal types in on slowbro more?

[Zilch]

Nah. What I mean is that once Slowbro gets +6 Special, the only real way to deal any relevant damage to him without praying for Thunderbolt criticals (Jolteon, Starmie, Gengar) is with physical attacks, i.e. Tauros, Persian, Rhydon, etc, ideally switching them in on the Rest turn.

You can try and "trap" Slowbro with SToss, too. While it's a 4HKO, you can knock him down to 193 HP and then switch, knowing that Bro will probably use Rest. This becomes a prediction war, though, and guessing wrong will result in your physical attacker's demise.

Oh, and if you use Victreebel, then by all means Razor Leaf away. Kingler's also a good non-physical type option to take down Slowbro as well.

[Dre]

You have bell, then you also have the haze users and raticate (lol).

I can't imagine kingler being that good of a counter because his special is terrible.

[lilith]

Dec 17, 2012 0:33:22 GMT -8 Zilch said:

Nah. What I mean is that once Slowbro gets +6 Special, the only real way to deal any relevant damage to him without praying for Thunderbolt criticals (Jolteon, Starmie, Gengar) is with physical attacks, i.e. Tauros, Persian, Rhydon, etc, ideally switching them in on the Rest turn.

You can try and "trap" Slowbro with SToss, too. While it's a 4HKO, you can knock him down to 193 HP and then switch, knowing that Bro will probably use Rest. This becomes a prediction war, though, and guessing wrong will result in your physical attacker's demise.

hmm, why would slowbro use rest over surf or twave there?

i feel like twave is superficially the strongest option for slowbro unless zam also twaves as it'll give slowbro a priority rest in all the other cases, after which he can start over and have good odds ko paralyzed zam. (unless there's a golem/rhydon and then it's kind of risky.)

so i'd probably prefer to twave with zam when slowbro wakes up - the only case where it's not blatantly better than stoss is if slowbro surfs immediately. if slowbro also twaves, it saves at least one turn and possibly more. if he rests, i can just do the same thing next time until he's FP, and then i got a twave for free. it can't really be PP stalled like stoss can.

as for surf, i think it is around 20% to ohko zam (considering a crit can't ohko). somebody should probably check this though. slowbro can potentially 2hko zam if zam twaves:

fp 50%
* fp 50%
* 2hko 40%
* 1hko 10% -> 5%
2hko 40%
* fp 50%
* 1hko 50% -> 20%
1hko 10% -> 10%

slowbro's odds of koing go up by ~15% from ~20% to ~35%, but zam also gains a 25% chance to be at full health instead of next to none, and a 90% chance of at the very least leaving slowbro both paralyzed and under 100hp for any random physical attacker that would normally fear slowbro to clean up easily. i feel like it's sort of like exploding on slowbro except zam also has a 2/3 chance to live. and in a +6 situation, i'm happy to trade zam for slowbro anyway.

so there are advantages and disadvantages to zam twave i guess, and maybe sometimes zam shouldn't twave just to mess with 100% surf in situations where sacrificing zam 1/3 of the time is still a big loss. but it's really, really bad for zam if slowbro twaves and he stosses. so i think slowbro should just surf most of the time expecting a twave, twave just enough to make stoss not worth it, and never rest.

anyway i really like zam's odds here in general - am i missing something obvious?

[Crystal_]

hmm, why would slowbro use rest over surf or twave there?

I guess Slowbro would've Twaved earlier anyway.

[lilith]

Dec 18, 2012 9:17:36 GMT -8 Crystal_ said:

hmm, why would slowbro use rest over surf or twave there?

I guess Slowbro would've Twaved earlier anyway.

oic, for some reason i was thinking slowbro set up against someone else and zam switched in as slowbro rested and got 2 stosses in, and that's why slowbro was at 100some hp. i'm not sure why i was thinking that...

[Crystal_]

yeh there's no point in switching zam into slowbro.

[Agent Syrup]

Funny thing is I'm now running a serious nonTauros/ nonChansey team right now. It takes some practice but I think it can do really well.

[Dre]

You can certainly do well without tauros, but it's just that you would do better with him.

At the same time though, I'm not sure every team without tauros inferior to one with tauros. I mean, you would need a really specific strategy for that to be true, but I still think it's possible to have a team where tauros isn't the optimal choice.

[lilith]

Dec 31, 2012 17:08:15 GMT -8 Dre said:

You can certainly do well without tauros, but it's just that you would do better with him.

At the same time though, I'm not sure every team without tauros inferior to one with tauros. I mean, you would need a really specific strategy for that to be true, but I still think it's possible to have a team where tauros isn't the optimal choice.

hmm, i feel like the trouble with specific strategies is that even if they're efficient, once your opponent realizes what your specific strategic needs are, there's a lower chance of pulling them off because in (tactical) situations, the options that you need to choose with high frequency will tend to be more obvious and pronounced, giving a disadvantage in prediction.

on the other hand, you can do whatever you want and tauros will still sweep, coz tauros is cool like that, making all the moves that lead up to the tauros sweep more unpredictable. i would be really interested and surprised to see a team that wasn't obviously sub-optimal in other ways that was worse with tauros (as in, not something like 5 pokemon with stab surf/blizzard/earthquake + zapdos ).

also, my earlier post is nonsense because i used an FP chance of 50% in my math... umm, let's pretend i didn't do that?

[Dre]

The main idea in my head was some kind of a team that has a specific threat (like a tanklax or a swords dancer) that conceals it until the end, and the rest of the of team is designed to remove its counters and/or allow it to set-up.

The idea would be if this pokemon can set up in the conditions it needs, it would be more of a threat than tauros. It would also need a good tauros match-up, or at least a team-mate to remove tauros, as it would likely see tauros end-game.

I did make a team based around this recently, but dropped it shortly after for my staple team, because I didn't have the patience to tweak it.

Either that or some kind of stall team, but stall doesn't really work in RBY.