Creative Playing
In competitive Pokémon, a lot of what you choose to do is directly impacted by your opponent and how you judge their style of play. Understanding style of play is a key way to understanding how to react when an opponent reveals a threat that requires a specific response to handle and how your opponent might react when you reveal a threat of your own.
Style of play is a loose term that I use here to mean:
1: The choices they make early-game. If they have a lead like Azelf, whether they taunt a slower lead like Swampert or set up Stealth Rock first says a lot about their play style (and experience). Early-game choices are particularly important, as they will give you a good deal of insight into what the opponent's style of team will be (a toxic spikes lead like Roserade will almost exclusively be on a stall team, bulky leads like Swampert and Metagross generally suggest bulky offense, and anti-leads like Dragonite and Machamp suggest a more offensive team).
2: Their level of prediction. Let's say they've seen that you have a gliscor/vaporeon combo and they send a Starmie out against your Vaporeon. Some players might use thunderbolt hoping to hit Vaporeon but a different player might predict a switch to Gliscor and use Ice Beam instead. If the opposing player is trying to predict your moves, you can psych them out by going to another switch or simply hitting your opponent's pokemon with a neutral/super effective move, though it is rare that the average player on smogon will try to predict your moves unless you have already switched in that way before.
3: Item use. In a general sense the item a pokemon carries determines its role on the opponent's team. A Choiced pokemon will be played with carefully, and bluffing a choice item by using something like Expert Belt or a type-resist berry on a pokemon that is generally x4 weak to an attack. Keep in mind also that if the pokemon is not known for carrying a Choice item then it is likely that it is one of these item-types. Common sense will tell you what item a pokemon is carrying if you don't see Life Orb recoil, Leftovers recovery, or increased damage output, especially when they have a glaring weakness that a resist berry will help mask (Heatran with Shuca Berry, Scizor with Occa Berry, Tyranitar with Chople or Babiri Berry, etc.).
With this understanding of the term 'style of play', let's talk about some ways we can use this understanding to make better decisions while playing and how to make your opponents trip themselves up in their confusion/overreaction.
Creative playing can open holes in your opponent's team when they've prepared standard responses to standard threats, and finding out ways to exploit the opponent's limited flexibility is the key to superior planning. Here is one example of a methodical way to play creatively (sounds contradictory, but it's really just getting the Pokemon to fill exactly the role you want it to):
Use Substitute! Using pokemon that can threaten certain sets will let you bluff an action that an opponent will not be willing to risk letting happen. Let's say you have a gyarados that you switch in on an opposing scizor using bullet punch. There's a lot of sets this gyarados can be running, and responses on the opponent's team will be crafted accordingly. A lot of opponents will move to block the worst-case scenario, so you will see a lot of switches that are designed to deal with dragon dance gyarados because that is the most threatening set Gyarados can run. On an offensive team you will see common revengers of DDGyara such as scarfed Rotom-A, scarfed Flygon, and scarfed Jirachi, while on stall teams you might see a switch to Vaporeon, Celebi, or Skarmory (or a different bulky water such as Suicune and Slowbro). Notice that a lot of these sets are not only restricted by the fact that they are choiced to be able to outspeed Gyarados after it gets +1 Speed, but that they rely on this speed to deal with gyarados in the future! Now consider this set:
Gyarados @ Leftovers
252 Atk/252 Spe/4 Def
Adamant/Intimidate
Substitute
Waterfall
Earthquake/Stone Edge/Ice Fang/Bounce/Payback (pick any 2)
This just lists Gyarados' most viable offensive moves. This set, in a really basic way, forces your opponent to limit their play to deal with your unusual move. If they reveal something like a Flygon/Jirachi/Rotom-A and they don't have leftovers recovery upon switching in (an important reason for setting up entry hazards, particularly Stealth Rock early in the game), you can assume that they are scarfed and that their move choice will be forced to break your substitute or else risk giving gyarados an extra turn to do something that the opponent can't guess! Even if you can't guess what item they have, you can still gauge how fast the opponent's pokemon is based on whether they outspeed you to break your substitue or not. The idea behind substitute sets is that you will get your pokemon into the game and force the opponent to switch, giving you the opportunity to use the best move you have on the occasion. This is still an offensive set that is trying to hit its counters as hard as it can, but it can still be crafted to meet the needs of your team and to better deal with more counters.
A simple exercise will help you to draft a counter set for a pokemon: going to the Smogon page of the Pokemon, scrolling down past all the pretty analyses, and reading the "Counters" section, where it lists some common pokemon and how they counter the specific pokemon. As you read each counter, think of how you could play differently and how it would help you to counter those specific examples. Let's continue to focus on Gyarados for the sake of simplicity, and here is a list of the pokemon the Counters section mentions with a few other generalized counters added in:
Rotom-A
Cresselia
Celebi
Tangrowth
Metagross
Forretress
Flygon
Slowbro
Suicune
Vaporeon
Starmie
Jirachi
Infernape
Gengar
Skarmory
Now instead of going into detail crafting a counterset for each pokemon, we'll look at the types of counters that exist to Gyarados. They're divided into two types:
1: Pokemon bulky enough to take a hit from Gyarados and KO back, cripple it (via burn/paralysis/poison, ordered from most to least threatening to gyarados), or phazing it from the field via Roar/Whirlwind.
2: Pokemon that outspeed Gyarados and can OHKO it (with a choice scarf).
An ideal counter set will be able to deal with as many pokemon on this list (and others of the general type of counter) as possible, but for the sake of understanding the process, we'll limit our focus to this list of pokemon.
I've bolded pokemon that rely on outspeeding Gyarados to counter him, as those are what we'll be focusing on with our moveset. I've italicized pokemon that resist his primary stab move Waterfall to add emphasis on those pokemon. Especially bulky pokemon that might not be 2hko'ed by any move that can be used even by +1 Life Orb Gyarados are underlined.
Now, to deal with type 1 counters, you have to look at the abilities those Pokemon have and the sets they commonly run. To focus on an example, let's focus on a rare but cool Gyarados counter, Slowbro. It can 2hko Gyarados with either Psychic or 1hko with Hidden Power Electric and will not be 2hko'ed by any attack Gyarados uses against it, even a +1 Adamant LO Earthquake, the most powerful move Gyarados can hit Slowbro with. Therefore, the best way to cripple Slowbro is to run a status move like Toxic which will ruin its ability to wall you over time. You will be forced to switch out after hitting Slowbro with Toxic, but it won't be able to stand in the way of Gyarados (and any other physical sweeper on your team) for long, especially considering that you can substitute stall for additional Toxic damage if the situation needs it. Most type 1 counters can be dealt with this way (Suicune being an exception because of its tendency to run Rest and Sleep Talk, and Celebi/Starmie being exceptions because of their Natural Cure ability, although this is only temporary as they will be switching out and giving a member of your team a free hit against the opponent). Considering how defensive teams are built around keeping the entire defensive core of their team as healthy as possible, you can see how Toxicing a key part of their core greatly weakens their team. Taunt is also an effective way to deal with defensive counters that can't hurt you directly but can remove you from the playing field and will generally let you get an advantageous switch against defensive pokemon that rely on status or phazing to harm the opponent (Celebi using Thunder Wave, Rotom-A using Will-o-wisp/Thunder Wave, Vaporeon using Toxic, and Skarmory/Suicune phazing you out). Metagross and Forretress are pokemon that are unusual counters in that they are bulky enough to take a hit but still take powerful damage from attacking moves that Gyarados can run and are also not affected by Toxic, therefore they will be covered further below.
Type-2 Counters are dealt with by these types of Substitute sets and packing the appropriate coverage move to best hurt them. Starmie, Gengar, and Rotom-A are best dealt with by using Payback, Jirachi/Metagross are best hit by Earthquake, and Flygon is best hit by Ice Fang, though Waterfall is a good option as well. Infernape may not likely switch in directly, but will be able to force out a regular DD Gyarados guaranteed with the threat of Thunderpunch or Stone Edge. Dealing with type 2 counters just involves picking the most effective mix of countering moves while balancing it with the ability to handle Type 1's! So the coverage move selection is entirely dependent on which pokemon you want Gyarados to be able to handle. The ideal moves for this situation would be Waterfall/Earthquake if you want to remove the most common scarfed threats for another sweeper like DDMence, as most scarfed pokemon will be smacked hard by Waterfall either way, particularly Flygon. Metagross is 2kho'ed by any kind of Earthquake and Jirachi is crippled by Earthquake, but Payback gets the 1hko on Defensive Starmie and Scarfed Rotom-A. Each move will work better depending on which of those threats you want to deal with better, but odds are you'll find Payback more useful for your team for eliminating Scarfed Rotom-A and Starmie, both who stand in the way of sweepers such as Infernape, Salamence, and Dragonite (Just a note here, but a Defensive Rotom-A will NOT be 2hko'ed even by a combination of Payback+Waterfall, so using Toxic on a Rotom-H with Leftovers is the best course of action). Waterfall does a decent job at hitting the other scarfed pokemon, 2hko'ing scarfed Flygon guaranteed and doing the most damage possible to Forretress, who will wall you to kingdom come but will not be breaking your substitute any time soon.
One other way of dealing with Type-2 counters is paralyzing them, and a lot of pokemon learn Thunder Wave. Running a Sub+TWave set is popular on other existing pokemon already like Jirachi and is occasionally seen on bulkier offensive pokemon like Dragonite, so this is a concept you can apply to this as well. Running coverage moves to deal with bulky defenders that you cannot paralyze and deal with later is another approach, but that is something you can try on your own to see what works best.
So, the best way to deal with Type 1 and Type 2 counters is a combination of the two approaches to beating those counters in the following set that we've calculated out based on our list of counters:
Gyarados @ Leftovers
8 HP/252 Atk/60 SpDef/188 Spe
Adamant / Intimidate
Substitute
Toxic/Taunt
Waterfall
Payback/Earthquake
This set gets the KO on Starmie/Rotom or deals with Jirachi/Metagross, lets you hit bulky waters with Toxic safely, and also gives you reliable STAB to hit what isn't covered by those moves effectively. This is weak to being set up upon by Skarmory/Forretress, but running Taunt over Toxic gives you the option of dealing with that as well as giving you a safe switch. The EVs put you at 245 speed, enough to outpace defensive pokemon that aim to beat Jolly Tyranitar, 8 HP EVs gives you a leftovers number+1, and the remainder is put into SpDef because it will cushion your switch-in vs. threats like Heatran, as Scizor remains your most common switch-in opportunity regardless of your defensive investment.
There is room for creativity in pokemon, you just have to be smart about how you can use this creativity to scout your opponent's team for threats while bluffing threats of your own.
Part 2 to come!
In competitive Pokémon, a lot of what you choose to do is directly impacted by your opponent and how you judge their style of play. Understanding style of play is a key way to understanding how to react when an opponent reveals a threat that requires a specific response to handle and how your opponent might react when you reveal a threat of your own.
Style of play is a loose term that I use here to mean:
1: The choices they make early-game. If they have a lead like Azelf, whether they taunt a slower lead like Swampert or set up Stealth Rock first says a lot about their play style (and experience). Early-game choices are particularly important, as they will give you a good deal of insight into what the opponent's style of team will be (a toxic spikes lead like Roserade will almost exclusively be on a stall team, bulky leads like Swampert and Metagross generally suggest bulky offense, and anti-leads like Dragonite and Machamp suggest a more offensive team).
2: Their level of prediction. Let's say they've seen that you have a gliscor/vaporeon combo and they send a Starmie out against your Vaporeon. Some players might use thunderbolt hoping to hit Vaporeon but a different player might predict a switch to Gliscor and use Ice Beam instead. If the opposing player is trying to predict your moves, you can psych them out by going to another switch or simply hitting your opponent's pokemon with a neutral/super effective move, though it is rare that the average player on smogon will try to predict your moves unless you have already switched in that way before.
3: Item use. In a general sense the item a pokemon carries determines its role on the opponent's team. A Choiced pokemon will be played with carefully, and bluffing a choice item by using something like Expert Belt or a type-resist berry on a pokemon that is generally x4 weak to an attack. Keep in mind also that if the pokemon is not known for carrying a Choice item then it is likely that it is one of these item-types. Common sense will tell you what item a pokemon is carrying if you don't see Life Orb recoil, Leftovers recovery, or increased damage output, especially when they have a glaring weakness that a resist berry will help mask (Heatran with Shuca Berry, Scizor with Occa Berry, Tyranitar with Chople or Babiri Berry, etc.).
With this understanding of the term 'style of play', let's talk about some ways we can use this understanding to make better decisions while playing and how to make your opponents trip themselves up in their confusion/overreaction.
Creative playing can open holes in your opponent's team when they've prepared standard responses to standard threats, and finding out ways to exploit the opponent's limited flexibility is the key to superior planning. Here is one example of a methodical way to play creatively (sounds contradictory, but it's really just getting the Pokemon to fill exactly the role you want it to):
Use Substitute! Using pokemon that can threaten certain sets will let you bluff an action that an opponent will not be willing to risk letting happen. Let's say you have a gyarados that you switch in on an opposing scizor using bullet punch. There's a lot of sets this gyarados can be running, and responses on the opponent's team will be crafted accordingly. A lot of opponents will move to block the worst-case scenario, so you will see a lot of switches that are designed to deal with dragon dance gyarados because that is the most threatening set Gyarados can run. On an offensive team you will see common revengers of DDGyara such as scarfed Rotom-A, scarfed Flygon, and scarfed Jirachi, while on stall teams you might see a switch to Vaporeon, Celebi, or Skarmory (or a different bulky water such as Suicune and Slowbro). Notice that a lot of these sets are not only restricted by the fact that they are choiced to be able to outspeed Gyarados after it gets +1 Speed, but that they rely on this speed to deal with gyarados in the future! Now consider this set:
Gyarados @ Leftovers
252 Atk/252 Spe/4 Def
Adamant/Intimidate
Substitute
Waterfall
Earthquake/Stone Edge/Ice Fang/Bounce/Payback (pick any 2)
This just lists Gyarados' most viable offensive moves. This set, in a really basic way, forces your opponent to limit their play to deal with your unusual move. If they reveal something like a Flygon/Jirachi/Rotom-A and they don't have leftovers recovery upon switching in (an important reason for setting up entry hazards, particularly Stealth Rock early in the game), you can assume that they are scarfed and that their move choice will be forced to break your substitute or else risk giving gyarados an extra turn to do something that the opponent can't guess! Even if you can't guess what item they have, you can still gauge how fast the opponent's pokemon is based on whether they outspeed you to break your substitue or not. The idea behind substitute sets is that you will get your pokemon into the game and force the opponent to switch, giving you the opportunity to use the best move you have on the occasion. This is still an offensive set that is trying to hit its counters as hard as it can, but it can still be crafted to meet the needs of your team and to better deal with more counters.
A simple exercise will help you to draft a counter set for a pokemon: going to the Smogon page of the Pokemon, scrolling down past all the pretty analyses, and reading the "Counters" section, where it lists some common pokemon and how they counter the specific pokemon. As you read each counter, think of how you could play differently and how it would help you to counter those specific examples. Let's continue to focus on Gyarados for the sake of simplicity, and here is a list of the pokemon the Counters section mentions with a few other generalized counters added in:
Rotom-A
Cresselia
Celebi
Tangrowth
Metagross
Forretress
Flygon
Slowbro
Suicune
Vaporeon
Starmie
Jirachi
Infernape
Gengar
Skarmory
Now instead of going into detail crafting a counterset for each pokemon, we'll look at the types of counters that exist to Gyarados. They're divided into two types:
1: Pokemon bulky enough to take a hit from Gyarados and KO back, cripple it (via burn/paralysis/poison, ordered from most to least threatening to gyarados), or phazing it from the field via Roar/Whirlwind.
2: Pokemon that outspeed Gyarados and can OHKO it (with a choice scarf).
An ideal counter set will be able to deal with as many pokemon on this list (and others of the general type of counter) as possible, but for the sake of understanding the process, we'll limit our focus to this list of pokemon.
I've bolded pokemon that rely on outspeeding Gyarados to counter him, as those are what we'll be focusing on with our moveset. I've italicized pokemon that resist his primary stab move Waterfall to add emphasis on those pokemon. Especially bulky pokemon that might not be 2hko'ed by any move that can be used even by +1 Life Orb Gyarados are underlined.
Now, to deal with type 1 counters, you have to look at the abilities those Pokemon have and the sets they commonly run. To focus on an example, let's focus on a rare but cool Gyarados counter, Slowbro. It can 2hko Gyarados with either Psychic or 1hko with Hidden Power Electric and will not be 2hko'ed by any attack Gyarados uses against it, even a +1 Adamant LO Earthquake, the most powerful move Gyarados can hit Slowbro with. Therefore, the best way to cripple Slowbro is to run a status move like Toxic which will ruin its ability to wall you over time. You will be forced to switch out after hitting Slowbro with Toxic, but it won't be able to stand in the way of Gyarados (and any other physical sweeper on your team) for long, especially considering that you can substitute stall for additional Toxic damage if the situation needs it. Most type 1 counters can be dealt with this way (Suicune being an exception because of its tendency to run Rest and Sleep Talk, and Celebi/Starmie being exceptions because of their Natural Cure ability, although this is only temporary as they will be switching out and giving a member of your team a free hit against the opponent). Considering how defensive teams are built around keeping the entire defensive core of their team as healthy as possible, you can see how Toxicing a key part of their core greatly weakens their team. Taunt is also an effective way to deal with defensive counters that can't hurt you directly but can remove you from the playing field and will generally let you get an advantageous switch against defensive pokemon that rely on status or phazing to harm the opponent (Celebi using Thunder Wave, Rotom-A using Will-o-wisp/Thunder Wave, Vaporeon using Toxic, and Skarmory/Suicune phazing you out). Metagross and Forretress are pokemon that are unusual counters in that they are bulky enough to take a hit but still take powerful damage from attacking moves that Gyarados can run and are also not affected by Toxic, therefore they will be covered further below.
Type-2 Counters are dealt with by these types of Substitute sets and packing the appropriate coverage move to best hurt them. Starmie, Gengar, and Rotom-A are best dealt with by using Payback, Jirachi/Metagross are best hit by Earthquake, and Flygon is best hit by Ice Fang, though Waterfall is a good option as well. Infernape may not likely switch in directly, but will be able to force out a regular DD Gyarados guaranteed with the threat of Thunderpunch or Stone Edge. Dealing with type 2 counters just involves picking the most effective mix of countering moves while balancing it with the ability to handle Type 1's! So the coverage move selection is entirely dependent on which pokemon you want Gyarados to be able to handle. The ideal moves for this situation would be Waterfall/Earthquake if you want to remove the most common scarfed threats for another sweeper like DDMence, as most scarfed pokemon will be smacked hard by Waterfall either way, particularly Flygon. Metagross is 2kho'ed by any kind of Earthquake and Jirachi is crippled by Earthquake, but Payback gets the 1hko on Defensive Starmie and Scarfed Rotom-A. Each move will work better depending on which of those threats you want to deal with better, but odds are you'll find Payback more useful for your team for eliminating Scarfed Rotom-A and Starmie, both who stand in the way of sweepers such as Infernape, Salamence, and Dragonite (Just a note here, but a Defensive Rotom-A will NOT be 2hko'ed even by a combination of Payback+Waterfall, so using Toxic on a Rotom-H with Leftovers is the best course of action). Waterfall does a decent job at hitting the other scarfed pokemon, 2hko'ing scarfed Flygon guaranteed and doing the most damage possible to Forretress, who will wall you to kingdom come but will not be breaking your substitute any time soon.
One other way of dealing with Type-2 counters is paralyzing them, and a lot of pokemon learn Thunder Wave. Running a Sub+TWave set is popular on other existing pokemon already like Jirachi and is occasionally seen on bulkier offensive pokemon like Dragonite, so this is a concept you can apply to this as well. Running coverage moves to deal with bulky defenders that you cannot paralyze and deal with later is another approach, but that is something you can try on your own to see what works best.
So, the best way to deal with Type 1 and Type 2 counters is a combination of the two approaches to beating those counters in the following set that we've calculated out based on our list of counters:
Gyarados @ Leftovers
8 HP/252 Atk/60 SpDef/188 Spe
Adamant / Intimidate
Substitute
Toxic/Taunt
Waterfall
Payback/Earthquake
This set gets the KO on Starmie/Rotom or deals with Jirachi/Metagross, lets you hit bulky waters with Toxic safely, and also gives you reliable STAB to hit what isn't covered by those moves effectively. This is weak to being set up upon by Skarmory/Forretress, but running Taunt over Toxic gives you the option of dealing with that as well as giving you a safe switch. The EVs put you at 245 speed, enough to outpace defensive pokemon that aim to beat Jolly Tyranitar, 8 HP EVs gives you a leftovers number+1, and the remainder is put into SpDef because it will cushion your switch-in vs. threats like Heatran, as Scizor remains your most common switch-in opportunity regardless of your defensive investment.
There is room for creativity in pokemon, you just have to be smart about how you can use this creativity to scout your opponent's team for threats while bluffing threats of your own.
Part 2 to come!
