I just want to preface this post in saying to do not forget to check the post just above. Damp Rock has been banned in ZU.
I will spend a few minutes (from my limited amount of free time at the moment) to discuss the UMPL battle between Tuthur and quagsgone. This battle is a really good picture of the current metagame, in my opinion, and showcases the current dynamism of ZU, the hazards game, the centralization of Tangela, and the strength and limits of Thievul.
Tuthur's team can be called a dark spam featuring a lot of common mid-tier threats; notably Golbat, Morpeko, and Thievul. From team preview, it's pretty obvious that Basculin is Scarfed because having 3 fast and frail breakers doesn't make much sense. The team is also very Rapidash weak without Scarf Basculin. Quagsgone's team, on the other hand is pretty mainstream, and can be categorized as a fat Kangaspikes. I'm personally not convinced about the use of Piloswine in this team, but Totodile (who is the builder) told me it was to have an electric immunity and a priority user.... which is fair I guess but it makes the team pretty weak against breakers and invites them in easily. The Rotom set is difficult to guess from team preview; it can be either specs, Sub + NP, or scarf. While the first two improve the stall match up, Tuthur isn't known to often use stall. This is especially the case after having a really poor battle against tjay the previous week with a really fat team, so a scarf set to give speed control, even if not optimal, is a possible scenario.
We notice that Quagsgone doesn't have a single dark resist against a pseudo-dark spam. Tangela deals comfortably with Morpeko, though, so Tuthur will have to rely on Thievul to make progress. Quagsgone's hazards game rely on Coalossal and Piloswine, both of which have a good match up against Ferroseed and Golbat respectively. However, none of them gets recovery so all damage taken makes progress. The Kangaskhan matchup can be good with rocks up, but Golbat walls it otherwise. Rotom, which will be revealed to be NP Sub, has a good match up even if Tuthur can afford to take one or two hits with Morpeko. Scarf Basculin, which is special in this team, has to weaken Wishiwashi and Tangela to be useful and is pretty pointless otherwise.
The battle happened. Here is the replay:
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen8zu-1341524906
Quagsgone won this game pretty comfortably. What is interesting is not the game in itself but why (in my opinion), Tuthur didn't have any good winpath in this battle as long as Quagsgone played correctly. Let's talk about positionning and the factors which lead to this result.
Part 1 : A demon called Thievul
When people start to play ZU, a common question is why play ZU over another tier? Romanticism for forgotten mons is certainly what attracts most people, but it is also true that ZU hides some weird mechanics that you would find nowhere else. One of them is the ability Stakeout, which is, from my knowledge, not available in any other tier since it's also banned in Balanced Hackmons.
Stakeout is what I personally call a pseudo-trap ability. Fundamentally, I dislike every form of trapping because switching is what makes this game a bit competitive in preventing the most devastating effects of matchups and allows to balance strengths and weaknesses of your Pokémon. If switching is not allowed, you don't have a team, but rather six individual Pokemon. Stakeout is one of these abilities which makes in my humble opinion the game less competitive. I will explain quickly the unhealthy aspect of this ability, how it makes Thievul dangerous but also how this ability also plays against it and makes it unreliable as a breaker.
Thievul is a demon when it can force a dilemma of stay & die or switch & die. Simply speaking, if you don't have one of the few hard counters, the option of switching is not tolerated against thievul due to the fact that it would annihilate whatever you would want to send in. Worse than that, as long as you choose to lose a mon on the switch, it can recreate this situation as many times as the opportunities allow it. This mon forces you to stay in – it’s the only solution to break the loop. This can be really unhealthy if you cannot afford to weaken the mon currently on the board and that is what makes Thievul a dangerous mon. However, this is also what makes Thievul unreliable as a breaker. Thievul is a mon with 87 SpA hitting with an 80 BP move. If the opponent stays in, its damage input is good but not impressive and rarely sufficent to break defensive cores. Thievul is always in a paradoxical situation where it wants to force the opponent to switch but the nature of its ability prevents switch ins.
I think the replay shows perfectly the strength and the limits of Thievul. When I talked with Quagsgone about this battle, he told me he had a bad Thievul matchup, but I don't entirely agree with this - I think the Thievul matchup was okay. It's true that Quagsgone didn't have any hard Thievul counter or a dark resist, as well as a very slow team which enables this kind of mid-tier breaker. However, Thievul couldn't force any free switch or any free kill early game. Piloswine tanks a hit as long as it is above 50% health and kills it with EQ + Ice shard, SpD Coalossal takes 30% from Dark Pulse, the Wishiwashi matchup is a coinflip but generally unfavorable for Thievul, and Kangaskhan OHKOs it with Double-Edge. The game featured two matchups favorable to Thievul, which were Tangela (where it still has to risk its Choice Specs being Knocked or being put to sleep), and Rotom. Against Rotom, however, it risks taking about 50% damage from Thunderbolt, which makes it hard to get any more trade value from it.
Tuthur managed to get two kills in this game from positioning his Thievul twice against Rotom. I don't think Tuthur played that sequence particularly poorly - he tried to find opportunities to get kills in the early game; it was his only way to make progress considering his two breakers had a hard time. The problem is that once Thievul was weakened, it couldn't force any other kill as long as the opposing team was decently healthy. I also want to highlight that Quagsgone played conservatively with his Tangela, to avoid any odds of a Dark Pulse flinch with Thievul. He systematically switched his Coalossal instead of Tangela into Morpeko, which was really good play in my opinion. Quagsgone simply didn't choke this game and not choking was enough to deny most possible winpaths with Thievul.
The only chance Tuthur had was to find a way to weaken quagsgone's team without using Thievul, and his two other offensive mons were barely useful for this. One way of accomplishing this was via hazards but this was also a tedious task.
Part 2 : Dealing with hazards
Hazards are broken in ZU. This is due to several factors which can be summarized in two parts - how good our setters are and how meh the removers are. Garbodor and Qwilfish are the most common ones notably due to their ability to soft check a large part of our metagame, especially Centiskorch and Thwackey. On the other hand, our defoggers are all pretty passive and abusable like Articuno and Altaria. Don't get me wrong, these mons are not bad, but they are simply easy to exploit due to the number of mons they give free momentum to, making them pretty vulnerable to double switches or being forced to defensively Roost.
In this game, we saw some uncommon setters & defogers but the logic stays the same. Tuthur uses a core of Uxie + Ferroseed + Golbat for hazards. As he is using a dark spam with two big breakers, he can’t opt for a mono boots team and is forced to get a hazard remover. With Ferroseed and Golbat, he controlled the hazards game relatively well. Golbat plays the role of the passive defogger, but Tuthur opted for U-Turn, probably to be more flexible overall and especially to position his breakers. However, we can note that Quagsgone’s team is very weak to toxic, and it would have maybe changed the outcome of the game if Golbat had Toxic.
Quagsgone had a really good advantage in using Piloswine + Coalossal. Piloswine is less seen nowadays but it has a positive matchup against Altaria&Golbat, which would have allowed it to be more useful in this game if it hadn’t been tricked turn 1. I really like Coalossal, which was considered mediocre in the past, but is seen more often nowadays and for good reasons. It is one the few Centiskorch answers, and it really shined in this matchup in being able to Spike, spin and pressure Ferroseed with a fire move.
Tuthur’s only way to win was to force Coalossal and Piloswine to be progressively weakened, and that's what he tried in tricking with Uxie. However, with his offensive core disabled and his defensive core losing against Quagsgone's, he quickly found himself in the opposite situation where he was trading to try to cgain momentum. If this was not enough, Coalossal could spin against Tuthur’s entire team (barring Basculin) without being really punished. Also, Golbat directly invted an NP Rotom which was making constant progress.
In this situation, Tuthur’s gameplan could have been to try to create a situation where hazards were only on quagsgone's side, which was (as we discussed) really difficult to do in practice, due to the poor matchup against the opposite hazard controllers. After that, he would have had to volt-turn continuously between morpeko and basculin to try to either weaken the coalossal or to catch tangela and to try to flinch it with Thievul. This situation is possible at least in theory but in practice, it was improbable, as all damage taken would put Tuthur closer and closer to being swept by Kangaskhan (and Quagsgone is a good player who doesn't choke).
I won't say that both players played every turn optimally but I think they played it quite well overall. It was also relevant to showcase the state of current ZU.
Part 3 : Tangela, the best Pokemon in ZU?
This part will be shorter than the two previous one and is more to engage discussion. Do you think Tangela is the best Pokemon in ZU? At the moment, it is, at least in my opinion. I think it is really advised to use it in every playstyle from stall to bulky offense due its ability to perfectly counter the most important threats of our current metagame. These include Silvally-Ground, Kangaskhan, Thwackey, Kabutops/Drednaw before the Damp Rock ban, and as we have seen today, also uncommon mons such as Morpeko. It is also the definition of a Pokemon that can make progress without being punished. Knock Off, Toxic, Sleep Power, and Leaf Storm are hard to answer and very punitive when all damage taken is healed in three switchs since Regenerator is a broken ability. I will personally vote it to be ranked S in the next VR update, and I'm curious to see what you all think about it.
Zee you later ~
Thank you Zayele to have corrected the grammar of this post.