Disjunction
Everything I waste gets recycled
Hello, it's another thread about changing a tier that barely anyone plays anymore. I've been waiting to bring up the topic of Baton Pass in this tier since last nupl, but there was never sufficient enough evidence to back it up since the player pool is historically very unmotivated and slow to pick up on trends. However, this nupl players are catching onto the fact that full chain baton pass is, predictably, quite cancer and easy to pilot to a win. More on that in a sec.
I'm usually a stickler for not changing these old gen lower tiers, but ADV NU is a pretty different case compared to a lot of other formats. Where a lot of tiers had an active generation to form a foundation of what is good and what is bad, the current iteration of the format did not. It was reformatted by Oglemi sometime in the past 6-8 years (so sometime in bw or xy era) and fundamentally changed with the addition of NFEs and some Pokemon like Sableye. The tier had a handful of active users playing pretty casually with each other for years and metagame developments happened pretty slowly. This is evidenced by the fact that Pokemon like Huntail and Hitmonchan were considered unstoppable metagame forces around 3 years ago, but rarely see much play nowadays. Compound this with the fact that the highest level people competed in was NUPL, where it was pretty common practice to have about 4-6 teams ready before the draft and to get a good player to reuse those teams as the season went on. Where other tiers had at least hundreds of users' battles and experiences to draw on during a critical time of development, ADV NU probably never broke into triple digits in the first year.
I'm explaining this because there was a decision to lock ADV NU's format sometime last year which you can find here. I know "set in stone" Smogon Policy is infamously destructible anyways, but I would feel some far off sense of guilt for not including why I think it's ok that I'm starting this conversation.
On the topic of full pass, the most popular team is one I made last NUPL which you can see here: https://pokepast.es/c5d7c7912c2472e8
Bare in mind this is a team I built probably in half an hour. By no means do I think this is the perfect version of BP and a more cunning and/or motivated player can probably push the playstyle even further. It works well for two reasons: Speed passing is easy in a gen where the fastest mon is 97 Base Speed and there is very little priority to speak of, and the defensive options available are barely passable for the normal status quo of offensive threats. This means you rarely even need over 2 cm boosts to just pressure everything as much as you need to with Octillery.
Here are some replays:
Noitu vs. Disjunction NUPL VII
The debut of the team. Noitu's counterplay is hoping for the correct Explosion roll/crit within the first 5 turns and doesn't get it. The team snowballs because I can get away with barely any speed investment to outspeed his entire team at +2 and set up on just about everything.
Earthworm vs neomon NUPL VIII
neomon's team is decidedly very underprepped for BP, but the little amount of counterplay available makes this less ridiculous than it looks in the replay.
Earthworm vs Triangles NUPL VIII
This is a won game but Triangles gets some timely crits with Mach Punch against subs and EW plays the mid- to end-game incorrectly. A second cm while behind sub and passing into oct wins the game relatively free.
There is counterplay available, but it's very limited. The options I know of are:
I bring this up now because it's becoming obvious it will be a problem for the rest of NUPL and it would be nice to nip the problem in the bud before the format devolves into more of this. My ideal solution is to ban statpassing altogether since there are a lot of mons that can make use of drypass (Flareon, Mawile, Plusle to name a few) and I don't think there is a sizable enough playerbase to revisit this decision with the accuracy needed if we chose to only ban speed passing or something like that. If there are people out there with enough dismay over a complex ban, then we can ban the move, but I am adamantly against any other alternative.
I'm usually a stickler for not changing these old gen lower tiers, but ADV NU is a pretty different case compared to a lot of other formats. Where a lot of tiers had an active generation to form a foundation of what is good and what is bad, the current iteration of the format did not. It was reformatted by Oglemi sometime in the past 6-8 years (so sometime in bw or xy era) and fundamentally changed with the addition of NFEs and some Pokemon like Sableye. The tier had a handful of active users playing pretty casually with each other for years and metagame developments happened pretty slowly. This is evidenced by the fact that Pokemon like Huntail and Hitmonchan were considered unstoppable metagame forces around 3 years ago, but rarely see much play nowadays. Compound this with the fact that the highest level people competed in was NUPL, where it was pretty common practice to have about 4-6 teams ready before the draft and to get a good player to reuse those teams as the season went on. Where other tiers had at least hundreds of users' battles and experiences to draw on during a critical time of development, ADV NU probably never broke into triple digits in the first year.
I'm explaining this because there was a decision to lock ADV NU's format sometime last year which you can find here. I know "set in stone" Smogon Policy is infamously destructible anyways, but I would feel some far off sense of guilt for not including why I think it's ok that I'm starting this conversation.
On the topic of full pass, the most popular team is one I made last NUPL which you can see here: https://pokepast.es/c5d7c7912c2472e8
Bare in mind this is a team I built probably in half an hour. By no means do I think this is the perfect version of BP and a more cunning and/or motivated player can probably push the playstyle even further. It works well for two reasons: Speed passing is easy in a gen where the fastest mon is 97 Base Speed and there is very little priority to speak of, and the defensive options available are barely passable for the normal status quo of offensive threats. This means you rarely even need over 2 cm boosts to just pressure everything as much as you need to with Octillery.
Here are some replays:
Noitu vs. Disjunction NUPL VII
The debut of the team. Noitu's counterplay is hoping for the correct Explosion roll/crit within the first 5 turns and doesn't get it. The team snowballs because I can get away with barely any speed investment to outspeed his entire team at +2 and set up on just about everything.
Earthworm vs neomon NUPL VIII
neomon's team is decidedly very underprepped for BP, but the little amount of counterplay available makes this less ridiculous than it looks in the replay.
Earthworm vs Triangles NUPL VIII
This is a won game but Triangles gets some timely crits with Mach Punch against subs and EW plays the mid- to end-game incorrectly. A second cm while behind sub and passing into oct wins the game relatively free.
There is counterplay available, but it's very limited. The options I know of are:
- Offensive Taunt CM Chimecho (good mon but doesn't fit on every team)
- Perish Song Haunter (outright worse than most other 4th moves)
- Haze Murkrow (not even guaranteed when there are lines involving restarting the chain and getting plusle in)
- Taunt Vigoroth (horrible mon and even worse set that I'm pretty sure doesn't even guarantee a win)
I bring this up now because it's becoming obvious it will be a problem for the rest of NUPL and it would be nice to nip the problem in the bud before the format devolves into more of this. My ideal solution is to ban statpassing altogether since there are a lot of mons that can make use of drypass (Flareon, Mawile, Plusle to name a few) and I don't think there is a sizable enough playerbase to revisit this decision with the accuracy needed if we chose to only ban speed passing or something like that. If there are people out there with enough dismay over a complex ban, then we can ban the move, but I am adamantly against any other alternative.