MoP's Musings

By Aeroblacktyl.
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You don't have to agree with me, but by not doing so, you're admitting that you're wrong. Anyways, we have really got to stop with the whole naming Pokémon things. This applies to everything in Pokémon. We have to stop naming Pokémon sets and we have to stop naming certain tactics.

Like, it is not semi-stall, are you having semi-car troubles? Because if your engine messes up but everything else is still working fine, you have a broken-ass car, not a semi-broken one. Realistically, determining what a team is is very black and white. It's either a stall team or it's an offensive team. So what if all six Pokémon don't stall? Your main objective is to counter as many things as possible and to wear down the other team with your residual damage before bringing in a sweeper or so. I don't understand why everyone is so anal over this when it's common acceptance in Ubers that you can have five tanks and then slap on Palkia and it's perfectly fine. But the second you build a stall team in OU with a core of Swampert, Skarmory, Rotom-A, Tyranitar, and Latias before slapping on a Lucario or Jirachi or something, it's all of a sudden called semi-stall. Wrong. That is still stall. It boils down to the objective of your team. This also holds true for offense. You don't need to have all six Pokémon hitting as hard as possible. It's perfectly fine to have a multi-purpose counter-all Pokémon. This doesn't mean you can change the name of the team to balance. This is extremely annoying, because most times there will be a debate or argument over a Pokémon and all of a sudden we get a whole Webster's dictionary course on the types of teams and that normally has no relevance to do with the subject that you started with. Just stick to either "stall" or "offense".

Another thing that totally has to go away with is naming sets. There always has to be someone first to think of something. That doesn't mean we have to name it after them. This is even more irritating when it's named after someone who WASN'T the first one to come up with it. Yes, I'm talking about the infamous "Cro-XXX" sets. Cromat came here during the RSE / Advance era. Do you know what a good staple on most teams was during the GSC era? It was Curse, Rest, Sleep Talk, and then a STAB move. Yet, the second we all see Suicune, everyone goes apeshit and names things with Rest+Sleep Talk+Stat Up move Cro-something. That doesn't make any sense. If John Dunk was the first basketball player to ever dunk the ball, and then Kobe Bryant does it 40 years later, do we call that a slam Kobe? Hell, no, but that does sound like a slamming piece of steak.

And finally, we have to dictate what a "good player" is. I'm not dropping any names here not because I want to avoid being personal, but I want every single person to question if this applies to them and then watch them trying to justify themselves as good. Anyways, there are good people who know what they're doing. It means not being too predictable and not using asinine things (in other words, gimmicks—looking at you here, Trick Room users). Then there are good players who win when they are supposed to. This means that they beat the aforementioned "bad players" consistently. The biggest examples of these people are those at the top of the ladder. Just stick in a stall team and auto-pilot. But the really good players are those who beat the ones who beat the good players. This is a difficult jump to make, because a lot of those who beat who they're supposed to don't have a single clue how to go into battle with another one of themselves. This normally leads to lackluster and boring matches. So really, someone you might consider good is really just average.

So really guys, let's stop being lazy and just say what we mean.

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