Battle Stadium Singles blog — Tools for Laddering (February 2022 update)

Mellow greetings. It is time for another update to the list of resources I use for BSS, the previous one being from May 2021.

Again, everything below is divided into three basic sections. First, tools for laddering: things you may want to have at hand when playing your own games; second, metagame resources: statistics, team-building resources and such; and, third, player streams and video content.

1) Tools for laddering
- 1.1 Damage Calculator
- 1.2 Usage Stats
2) Metagame resources
3) Player streams
- @shar_poke
- @Pythagoras_Poke
- kacr
- SnowParty
- Kiby
- @ir_poke
- @fortune_36
- @Bannbee
- @hyuno_OLD
- @Porygon_X
- @Frontier_pk
- @raibarori

1) Tools for laddering

Damage calculators and data on usage are useful to have a tab open for during a laddering session, but the more experienced you get, the less reliant you are on them.

Moreover, you will eventually start to recognize popular rental teams, and may want to compile collections of pokepastes of popular teams for given rulesets.

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 little reason to use them.

1.2 Usage Stats

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

The two sources of BSS usage stats I use are Ryuna's Pokemoem, and pokedb—both based on the official HOME backend data, providing a far more palatable way of presenting it than the official app does.

Pikalytics also exists, but does not seem to be updated for BSS as regularly.

2) 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 Fishidol.com (the new Nouthuca)

With the veritable institution that is Nouthuca going dormant, Fishidol has stepped up as the go-to aggregator for BSS, listing links to top-rated players' construction blogs.

Granted, the search options are nowhere near as sophisticated as they are on Nouthuca, but at least you can sort teams based on the restricted pokemon they feature. Kind of. Admin Twitter.

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, this format being a mostly Korean/Japanese affair.

2.3 Pokemon Showdown

Showdown remains an invaluable tool for team-building, with readily-available EV-knobs right there to fiddle. Well worth the time to do some testing on before building ingame.

3) Player streams

The BSS-creators highlighted below fulfill two main criteria: very high level of play, and regular output of content.

@shar_poke

Kuroko is the most accomplished BSS player active today. Multiple first places and single-digit finishes across generations 7 & 8. YouTube. Twitcasting. Blog.