HugAKitten

Chansey <3. It's super adorable! It's been my favorite for a super long time, but as of gen 6 it now eclipses a larger fraction of the competitive Smogon-OU metagame than any other Pokemon too!

This is my first one of these, so I suppose I should set my expectations too high. But this looks like too much fun not to play .

A bunch of things: Don't forget to set Ferrothorn's speed IV to 0 for gyro ball! I think if you start running calcs you will be quickly disillusioned about this Charizard set. With no sun, Charizard X still hits harder with flare blitz. Also your solar beam and air slash on this set are absurdly weak; neither is going to OHKO even the things that are weak to them. After looking at a lot of calcs, I'm pretty sure that Charizard X with a jolly nature and flare blitz, dragon claw or outrage, earthquake, and thunderpunch kills everything in the same number of hits or less, except for Quagsire. And you also get WAY better defense for this swap. Your physical Char-Y set doesn't even have the surprise factor on its side, because they can't see which it is until after you've shown a physical move (which you invariably will the first turn its out, because your special attacks are so weak on that set). Do not use beat up on Weaville. Knock off is far better. Given your team, beat up will be effectively 80.3 base power if everyone is still alive; if they're not it's only worse. Knock off is 97.5 and you swipe their item! Also if you beat up a Terrakion, Coballion, or Ferrothorn you will cry. Aegislash will wind up doing slightly more damage on average if you make it quiet instead since it's going to be looking to kill almost everything with the shadow ball -> shadow sneak combo, and it will get double the damage scaling on the stat points from shadow ball. Sacred sword is only for the dark types, which as far as I can see with calcs you already kill all of with sacred sword -> shadow sneak when you're quiet (except Mandibuzz, which you can't get past either way). I recommend moving 32 special defense EVs on Mandibuzz to HP. This grants you 1 additional leftovers recovery each turn while only dropping the damage you'll take from most special attacks by 1 or 0. A net gain on HP overall! Do yourself a big favor and use roost over protect too. Also in case you get confused or hit with foul play you should drop your attack IV to 0; it's costless to do so. That's a solid Latios set, except if you decide to make the Char Y -> Char X swap as I recommended then you get significantly better coverage with surf over energy ball (now that there won't be sun). Notably Latios won't just cry against all steel types with that. Also like Mandibuzz it's costless to drop your attack IV to 0.

The first Pokemon that I properly EV trained was my Azumarill, because huge power means that I get double returns on training attack and that an enormous percentage of its power comes from IVs and EVs rather than level-induced attack gain. After that I did it with my Amoonguss, because black sludge (and occasionally synthesis) subtracting a fixed percentage of my maximum HP from each attack means that EV training with HP and special defense drives the damage I receive per turn underneath 0 in finite effort instead of just asymptotically near to 0 in the unattainable limit. For almost the entirety of the game those were the only 2 I bothered with since I was getting hugely improved power scaling for my efforts, though now with some time to kill between episodes I'm going back and doing this for the rest of my team. As a nice side benefit, EV training Amoonguss let it eat judgment from an Arceus 40 levels higher than it to land toxic and win that fight trivially. Azumarill too usually over-performs spectacularly on my team by tanking hits from stuff that out levels it and OHKOing it back. Really EV training is very worth the effort, assuming you have bred a Pokemon with great IVs and the right nature and ability. It makes some real monsters, and isn't actually very time consuming at all if you pick spots intelligently (unless you want special attack or *shudder* special defense).

Everything seemed 100% clear and simple to me, with one exception. It took me forever to figure out that some of the Crustles popping out of the nest were already asleep, but that I mysteriously couldn't interact with these unless I'd put them to sleep myself. I didn't realize that I needed to use rage powder on these, then spawn a new Crustle; I thought the game was just glitching. My way of handling this was to run back to Agate Circus every time I sleeping one spawned so that it would disappear. It was very frustrating. I finished nearly the entirety of route 2 this way before I figured out that rage powder actually had a legitimate use besides letting you catch Crustle. Now I feel silly .

My high school calculus teacher must have overlooked teaching me about stuffing q-tips in every orifice...

Roar/whirlwind is way far from a niche baton pass counter though. Both because it's pretty universally great, and because by itself it's not actually a baton pass counter . Being serious, here's the take of an ex-baton-pass user. I run a full stall team now in OU, which is canonically baton pass's easiest match-up (we don't even get random crits as an out and often can't do more to calm mind Espeon than seismic toss it 4 times). My team has never ever had trouble with baton pass thanks to this wondrous bit of tech though: Gyarados (M) @ Gyaradosite Ability: Intimidate EVs: 252 HP / 48 Def / 208 Spd Jolly Nature - Rest - Sleep Talk - Roar - Waterfall It's generally useful in the exact same capacity that it was back in Gen 4 OU when this set was common stall tech (and has gained utility too with its ability to counter Conkeldurr, many variants of Gliscor that didn't exist then, and a couple others, and also now commonly being guessed to be a dragon dance killer instead). Then as a nice side benefit it also makes BP teams cry. I also run a perish song Celebi that outspeeds Smeargle, though it was independently selected for heal bell support, taking spores, and ability to beat last Pokemon of the magic guard variety, not because of the baton pass match-up. It rarely ever comes into play against baton pass teams because it's too funny to watch them helplessly cry against Gyarados. After that set above, the next best thing you can run against BP teams is prankster taunters (Thundurus/Tornadus being the best for their ability to also hit very hard, though Sableye, Murkrow, Whimsicott, Tornadus, Liepard, and Mega-Banette are all so rough for them it scarcely matters). The opponent can't even baton pass to Espeon to deal with the taunt; in a large majority of circumstances if you get it in against a non-Espeon then your opponent is just forced to restart the chain completely. Third best thing is haze, though the opponent can taunt you out of being able to do it. After that CB Talonflame gets an honorable mention since it can always stop them unless they can get some defense boosts passed by Vaporeon or Zapdos prior to getting any speed boosts (since Talonflame is a dead stop to Scolipede/Ninjask being able to pass anything). If you don't have any of the above things then you have to rely on smart play, hard hitters (Mega Mawile is good because it forces 50-50 guesses on all BP team defense boosters with SD just by hitting *that* hard), random taunters, perish song users, and Ditto, all of which aren't counters but have alright chances when used intelligently. A generally good strategy if you have access to it is to try and get some prior damage on Espeon, which is usually really easy since they're forced to bring it in to handle any whirlwind/taunt user that you've got. Then with some prior damage on it you can often take the stored power at the end with something that has a sash (BP teams rarely have hazards) and KO back with a special move, since if you played smart they probably acrued at most 2.5x special defense through calm minds. In particular blaze + sash + overheat mixed infernape sets are very good at this (some of them can even follow up with a mach punch after before they go out). But at this point you're actually letting baton pass teams play the game instead of just free-winning against them. Who wants that?