Time to heat things up with this week battle!
It is time for your weekly UPPL Update for your Nimbasa City Emolga! This week your Nimbasa City Emolga battled against the aggressive Nagano Pangoro. Their coach was Luke from Luke Loves Pokemon Podcast who took his fan favorites and were clawing for a win. So there was no going easy as we needed to be on our toes if we wanted to survive this Pangoro attack!
Pre-Battle Prep
Luke doesn’t have too much battling experience outside of main game play. He is simply a man who loves Pokemon which is pretty respectable. After all, I love Pokemon too. Though, I knew that the Pokemon he picked were almost a hard counter to the Pokemon that I have chosen. Luke’s Pokemon were all strong Pokemon that could hit my favorites really hard if I wasn’t careful. That was especially true for Luke’s Kommo-o, Toxicroak, and Raikou.
Let start with Luke’s Kommo-o which was able to threaten most of my team. This is a solid Pokemon that has access to attacks such as Flash Cannon and Flamethrower. These two attacks could take out three of my to-go favorite Pokemon when it comes to battling.
Flash Cannon is a Steel type move that can hit my Mega Altaria and Florges pretty hard. These two Pokemon would be possible Pokemon that can take on Kommo-o normally. Though, if these Pokemon came to battle then they will find themselves on the receiving end of a Flash Cannon. That wouldn’t be good because Kommo-o can easily out speed these two Pokmeon before they can fire off a Fairy type attack. I would love to hit Kommo-o with a Fairy Return or Moonblast but I knew that my Fairy Pokemon couldn’t live long enough before the Special Attack power of Kommo-o.
Kommo-o also has access to a powerful Flamethrower attack. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem. Though, Kartana will burn up if Flamethrower hits it. Especially if we are backed into a corner with Kartana as our last Pokemon. Our Kartana has no attacks on it that would hit Kommo-o for a one-hit knockout. We do have one attack but I doubt that it would have been a clean cut.
The next Pokemon that we had to worry about from Luke was Toxicroak. This Pokemon has several powerful attacks that can hit our Pokemon pretty hard. The first one was Toxicroak’s Poison Jab attack. Once again, our Fairy Pokemon didn’t want to touch this Pokemon. There was no way they would get out of this match up without taking serious damage. Toxicroak also could use Ice Punch which would put a huge dent into Gliscor. Either way, we wanted to ensure that our Pokemon didn’t touch Toxicroak.
Raikou was also going to prove to be a threat that we needed to worry about. This tiger has a huge Special Attack power and can hit anything hard when given the opportunity. Thunderbolt and Hidden Power Ice will hit any Pokemon like a truck. Especially our Volcanion and Gliscor. We needed to be careful on who we switch into if we wanted to survive a hit from Raikou.
If we wanted to worry about another wall to overcome then look no further then Mega Sableye. This Pokemon has a massive Defense. What is even worst is that it can bounce back any non-damaging attacks thanks to Magic Bounce. That means Sableye has immunity to our Gliscor’s deadly Toxic attack. We also couldn’t freely use Stealth Rock without worrying about them being bounce back to our side of the field. We would need to muscle our way through Mega Sableye if we wanted to take it down.
The last two Pokemon we wanted to focus on was Bewear and Snorlax. These two are bearlike Pokemon that Luke loves. They also bear some serious threats to our Pokemon. Especially with both of them packing Ice Punch. They each have massive Attack power that can tear up Gliscor if we are not careful. Even worst, they have defense thanks to their status and abilities that make them difficult to take down.
So what were our options?
Team Prep
Did I say Fairy a lot? That is because our Fairy Pokemon were fairly sure they were not going to be battling once again. There are too many threats on Luke’s team that makes us wary of bringing them. They may be able to knockout Kommo-o but that Pokemon has so much Special Attack power that our Fairy would be dead on arrival.
That said, lets talk about how we were going to handle our Ice problem. We knew that our Pokemon can’t handle the cold. If Raikou was Choice Scarf or Spec then it will run though our team like a cold Winter wind. We could use Volcanion to handle it but that will only force Raikou out or if Raikou wasn’t Choice then it will strike us down with Thunderbolt. Zeraora could also come take a Thunderbolt or Hidden Power Ice. Though, he has no real solution.
Though, we have came up with a few plans to handle Raikou.
The first thing we decided to do was bring out Scrafty from our reserves. This Pokemon has solid Special Defense and can keep on hitting. We gave this hooded figure an Assault Vest to take the hits a bit better. He also had moves such as Ice Punch, Poison Jab, Drain Punch and Zen Headbutt to take down anything for Super Effective damage. We wanted to live and hit.
Our other counter for Raikou was going to be Fightinium Z on Zeraora. We knew that we couldn’t hit Raikou too hard but Raikou could hit us pretty decently. So if we wanted to hit Raikou with Zeraora then we needed to make sure it counted. That is why we gave Zeraora access to All-Out Pummeling. This would put a huge dent into Raikou. That way Zeraora could take it out or one of our other Pokemon.
Volcanion was here as our solid wall and Special Attacker. He could easily burn up Bewear if this Pokemon had the Fluffy ability. A powerful Steam Eruption or Flamethrower could take out Mega Sableye. This Mega may have some mega Defense but it is lacking in the Special Defense side. If we wanted to try to take out Toxicroak then Volcanion could fire off some Flamethrower if Luke brought a Dry Skin variant.
Noivern had to come in this week because we wanted a solid revenge shot on Kommo-o if given the opportunity. Noivern could easily out speed Kommo-o which means that we had a chance to knockout the Fighting-Dragon Pokemon with a solid Draco Meteor.
Lastly, we have Kartana. Our favorite Swiss army knife. Though, we had to make changes to his arsenal. As mention before, normally Kartana has nothing to take on Kommo-o. The dragon resist all of Kartana’s normal favorites. If we wanted to give Kartana a fighting chance against Kommo-o then we needed Psycho Cut on it. This Psychic attack wasn’t strong compare to Kartana’s other attacks. Though it did hit Kommo-o for Super Effective damage. Maybe we could get lucky with a Critical Hit. Though we wanted to at least hit Kommo-o hard if Kartana was facing a Flamethrower.
We have now picked our favorites to go against Luke’s favorites. Let see who picked the stronger favorites.
The Battle
You can click on the image above to watch the battle
It is time to duel! And we decide to set down our Gliscor. Meanwhile, Luke summoned his Kommo-o in attack mode! This wasn’t bad for us but we needed to at least set up Stealth Rock to start rolling the ball in our direction. We also learn that Clanging Scales does a lot of damage to Gliscor. That will be important later. Especially when the face off again later in the match.
Eventually Gliscor and Kommo-o were face to face with each other. I had no real way to deal with Kommo-o but I did know that it couldn’t knockout Gliscor with one hit. That is why I decided to use Toxic on Kommo-o and proceed from there. After all, Gliscor was going first so we can constantly use Roost to recover hits while Toxic slowly drain Kommo-o of it’s HP.
Granted, I will give props to Luke for eventually seeing the pattern of my attacks. Right before Kommo-o went down, Luke had his Pokemon use Focus Blast which took out half of Gliscor’s HP. It puzzle me for a long time while it did so much damage. That was because when Gliscor uses Roost, it loses the Flying typing which is used to resist Focus Blast. That was painful to see but luckily Gliscor lives to fight again.
Speaking of things that don’t get to live to fight again. Lets talk about Scrafty. This little boy did some fighting against a Snorlax. It kept using Drain Punch to do some solid damage on the big cat-bear Pokemon. I really did think that maybe we had found our solution to Snorlax that didn’t involve Kartana. Though, it looks like Luke is a crafty fellow as he had equip his Snorlax with Counter. That was able to bounce back Scrafty and knock it out.
Was I disappointed? I wasn’t. I just wished that I could have used Scrafty a bit more to tank some hits. It did put us in a tough spot as now we have one less switch in against Raikou. Which was Scrafty original purpose on the team.
The rest of the match was just well timed switch in and countering when a chance came up. I had found out in practice matches that Volcanion can easily take down Mega Sableye with a good Flamethrower. That showed in our match as Volcanion came in and take down. Mega Sableye.
That move had set us up for Luke’s last Pokemon. He was stuck between striking down my Volcanion with Thunderbolt or predict our switch to Gliscor. Either way, he was going to be locked to a certain attack. We swap to our Gliscor to hopefully take one Hidden Power Ice. Lucky for us. Luke had locked his Raikou to Thunderbolt and allow our Gliscor to come into a Thunderbolt. All we had to do at this point was click Earthquake and strike down Raikou.
This battle featured our buster blader coming in and doing what it does best. Bust some dragons and lead us to the win.
Coming Soon
Coming up next for your Nimbasa City Emolga! A battle with the Ju City Jumpluff who are being coach by Bagelnoob from Pokemon GO FM. This guy may do his battles in Pokemon GO but he knows his competitive Pokemon battling.
Currently the Ju City Jumpluff are on a win strike and that is because Bagelnoob has lined up a pretty solid team each week. He has a solid defensive core with Toxapex and Torandus-T thanks to the Regenerator ability. Solid Pokemon such as Espeon, Magnezone and Weavile. There are plenty of things to be worried about when facing the Ju City Jumpluff. This is going to be a real test for both Bagelnoob and myself.
We are still riding our win streak. Will we stay on top of it after Week 7? We will see!
Record: 5-1-0
Signing off!
