Battle Stadium Singles blog — Tools for Laddering (May 2021 update)

Hello there. This is an update for a page I made last year, containing what I considered some of the most relevant resources for BSS team-building and laddering at the time. I decided to do this again after concluding that enough has happened since that previous effort of mine on this front to warrant revisiting.

   I have divided things into three separate headings; first, tools useful for having at hand while actually laddering; second, resources for getting deeper into the metagame; and, third, consistently active player streams to watch when not quite feeling the itch to get repeatedly put down by Japanese school children yourself.

1)  Battling Tools

Under this heading you will find things that are useful to have a browser tab open for while actually doing your laddering. In other words, damage calculators and data on usage, although the better you get, the more you start to recognize popular rental teams, so you may actually go as far as collecting pastes of top teams.

1.1  Damage Calculator

The 45 second turn timer on console is enough to run a crucial calculation when you've exported your team from the Showdown team-builder beforehand.

   It should be noted that Pikalytics and Showdown itself also have calculators, but they are crucially not tuned to BSS with pre-set standard sets to calculate against, so there is no reason to use them.

1.2  Usage Stats

Usage stats are especially useful for newer players seeing something weird for the first time, ideally providing non-junk data to help with decision-making in this best-of-one format.

   There are three main sources of BSS usage stats outside the unnecessarily unwieldy HOME mobile app: Pikalytics, Pokemoem, and pokedb — all of which work by using the official HOME backend data, and providing a more palatable way of presenting it.

   Despite being the slowest to update, my go-to while playing is Pikalytics, simply because it loads the fastest for me, and I don't speak Japanese to make effective use of pokedb in a 45 second window.

Regirock's item usage for the last month of Series 8 as presented by ryunavgc's site.

2)  Team-Building & Metagame Resources

Below you will find things to do while outside the game, with the goal of finding interesting teams to pilot, going through the justifications great players give for the decisions they make on their teams, and, ultimately, for building your own teams.

2.1  Nouthuca

Nouthuca is an aggregator site for top-players' team construction blogs, the primary source of teams, universally regarded as the best single resource for BSS anywhere. Now, BSS being an overwhelmingly East Asian affair, it is naturally only available in Japanese, but ryunavgc's (Twitter) tool helps with searching if using websites with translated listings of the relevant terminology like Bulbapedia (items, moves) is unpalatable.

  In any case, if you plan on building your own teams at some point, you will be spending hours upon hours mining blogs you found on nouthuca, copy-pasting them into your web translation tool of choice.

2.2  Smogon Resources

The group therapy of the Battle Stadium Discord is the main selling point here, English-language interlocutors knowledgeable about BSS being, simply put, virtually impossible to find anywhere else.

   As for the forums, the Speed Tiers thread is invaluable for team-building, but for everything else, your mileage may vary.

2.3  Pokesol (YouTube / Twitter)

Pokesol has unfortunately long since scaled back on their written stuff, apparently having to do with some editors departing after a failed attempt to monetize a Discord-channel (?), proving that there's drama to be had even with virtually nothing at stake.   

    Nevertheless, their YouTube is still alive and well. They tend to do editorials on individual pokemon, but have more recently diversified into more variety content with a BSS-twist.

2.4  Pokemon Showdown

If you're wondering why Showdown is this far down the list despite effectively being a second ladder for the format, it's because the Showdown experience has a few marked differences from the console one, understandably offering a slightly distorted view of what the format is like.

   The fact that a major out of an entire playstyle — "time-over-death", typically on defensive cycle teams, very much high-ladder fare — is in no small part invalidated due to the lack of animations and the discrepancy on how the game timer is implemented distorts the ladder to an unacceptable degree for many. (Not for me, though, being a relatively stylistic momentum-offense player myself. No, I just get walled and leave the game long before the timer-based win-condition would ever even come into play.)

   Another major problem is the lower playerbase: you hit the same people over and over, which, again, invalidates things like lure sets and many kinds of non-standard play in an annoyingly large precentage of games during a given laddering session, a clear departure from the "one-and-done" console experience.

   Nevertheless, Showdown remains an invaluable tool for team-building, with readily-available EV-knobs right there to fiddle. And, in all fairness to the ladder itself, my experience over the past three years of playing is that you do initially get good games faster than you do on console (despite the lower barrier to entry seeing a fair share of memes you never play against on console), but the peak skill level is lower. In other words, still a platform well worth the time to do some testing on before building ingame.

Via pokedb: How about that jump in Porygon2 usage as a response to Calyrex-S in late-Series 8? Of course it also helps that its SpDef-sets check Zapdos.

3)  Player Streams

The BSS-streamers I have chosen to highlight below are ones that both play at an extremely high level and have churned out content with an impressive level of regularity more or less over the entirety of this generation.

   If you do click through the links below, you will, once again, be confronted with the inescapable reality that none of it is in English. This is unfortunate, but the cold hard fact of the matter is that competitive pokemon outside East Asia is dominated by VGC and the smogon formats, which means there simply is no consistent high-level content being produced for BSS in English. The closest we have to it at the moment is the effort put in by the venerable cant say on his stream.

@Pythagoras_Poke

Arguably the most consistent player of defensive styles.

@Ka_Cr_He

A top player with as many accounts as he has podium finishes.

SnowParty

Probably the most popular high-level Korean BSS-streamer, one of the old guard from generation 7 (Twitter).

@shar_poke

Multiple first places and single-digit finishes across generations 7 & 8.

@ir_poke

An excellent player with regular content.

@fortune_36

Great player with among the best production values for live streamers. Editor at Pokesol.

@Bannbee

The great Bannbee, content often tends toward memes, click-baity, navigating through the banal, inane, and vacuously self-indulgent world of youtubing.

   Popular enough to be considered a major trend-setter in the format — to the extent something like that exists in BSS, that is.

@hyuno_OLD

Another excellent ladder and tournament player.

@Frontier_pk

Frontier is a YouTube channel that provides bi-monthly showmatches between top players.

kacr's 100 win RTA ("real-time attack") attempt ended at ladder rank #1 with a record of 82-31 after 18 straight hours of laddering. 5th & 6th May; Season 18; Series 9.

4)  Final Thoughts

Despite the categorization above, in reality, of course, everything contained in this page intersects and overlaps in a person's development as a player, the end result being a vast ocean of partly subconscious knowledge and internalization, not only allowing one to maintain a 60-70% win rate playing any style imaginable, but making it look easy doing so.

   In short: you need to get to know the basics in order to abandon them to do your own thing. And the way you do that is by watching streams, reading blogs by top players for insights into team-building and the metagame, finding and conversing with your peers also on the same path, and, most importantly, playing games yourself.

- Tox

SW-0021-9848-8999