Battle Stadium Singles blog - Generation 9 coverage roadmap & the top-3 mons returning to BSS from Dexit-exile (?)
I may be jumping the gun here a bit, but I figured this would be fun to do, so what the heck! To kick off my coverage of generation 9, I briefly go over three prominent pokemon that were absent from SWSH, and whose return to ranked singles make me the tingliest. Mild spoilers ahead.
Oh, and I also gave some thought to what I would like do with this space going forward, so you can take the brief outline below as a PSA of sorts for what to expect here in the near future.
1) Roadmap for gen9 coverage
Before we get to the fun part, I wanted to start off by setting down some goals here for what I want to do for gen9 singles.
First, monthly team write-ups. This will be my bread and butter for what I am assuming will be years to come: I love stealing from my peers and subjecting their cores or, hell, entire teams, to some dubious corner-cutting or a greedy twist. The goal is to do at least one per month.
As a side note, the rotating rulesets (Series') of gen8 I felt like played to my strengths as someone who can't just sit there and play the same, bog-standard, stuff over and over again, so I would be pleased should they make a return.
Second, online competition coverage. There is no reason to think the developers would do away with weekender tournaments, so expect coverage for official online competitions whenever they are held in the single battle format.
Third, general resource coverage. It shouldn't be too difficult to do an update to a page aggregating various tools and resources for ranked singles on console out there — like this one — every few months.
Fourth, short takes. Depending on how much fun the game is, I may do short write-ups that amount to a brief rundown on a particular aspect of what is going on in the format. If this sounds a bit vague, I can only say that it does so very much intentionally.
2) Caveat emptor: the list
Okay then. Aside from my 4+ years of experience playing BSS, everything below is based on early unconfirmed leaks eventually borne out by my access to a pre-release copy of the game (version 1.0.0), as well as a complete datamine (11-Nov-2022) as covered in the smogon leak thread. This includes the full vanilla pokedex, and complete movepools (version 1.0.1) in national dex order (Charmander-Melotetta, Chespin-Annihilape).
Beating the game before the street date is time-honored tradition. Even way before simultaneous global releases were a thing, we used to find a way to get access to Japanese carts or ROMs...
Full disclosure, this started out as a list of five pokemon. Unfortunately, things like the newfangled Primeape evolution Annihilape, with its Swampert-level defensive bulk, 110 Base HP Final Gambit and 90 Speed U-Turn — not quite fast enough to revenge Dragon Dancers or Quiver Dancers with Choice Scarf despite having a viable niche as being immune to both Breloom's Spore and Mach Punch — and Gluttony Muk-A losing its recovery in Recycle on its Minimize + Curse sets just makes the list of pokemon returning from Dexit-exile a depressing read indeed, in terms of BSS-viability, at least.
#1 Greninja
Remove Dynamax, and Protean Greninja is like a better Cinderace: fast, with a potent priority attack, and a movepool with even more depth than Cinderace's. And like Cinderace, Focus Sash, Life Orb, Choice-items — all have their use-cases.
Because of Focus Sash in particular, Greninja does not even need Protean for its more supportive sets (Taunt), which enjoy firing off a Torrent-boosted Water Shuriken as a parting gift.
Without Dynamax bulk around with which to live through regular super-effective attacks, Greninja's revenge-killing Choice Scarf sets should also reward good team-building again — as was the case with Ice Beam against +1 Mega-Salamence, and Rock Tomb against +1 Volcarona. Moreover, with Protean taking a hit in gen9, now only being able to change type once after each time it is sent out, the Choice Scarf role outlined above looks even better.
Mercifully, Greninja is reserved for HOME transfer only, which means it won't be in the game at launch, HOME compatibility announced as coming only in "Spring 2023".
#2 Breloom
Focus Sash Spore, Technician-boosted STAB Mach Punch + Bullet Seed, Speed control in Rock Romb, or, heck, even wall-breaking with Swords Dance, are things that have made Breloom almost impossible to 1v1 since modern ranked play on console was implemented in generation 6. But even before that, Breloom was the most potent Focus Sash user in generation 5's GBU.
And last time we saw Breloom, it was instrumental in spawning an entire team archetype in "suropoke Trick Room" (Breloom-Mimikyu-Mega-Mawile). Thus, there's good reason to expect great things from Breloom again, even more so now that we finally know the Sleep status didn't get the Legends: Arceus treatment.
#3 Vivillon
Vivillon is the flying Glalie, or to use a more recent example, Zygarde-C. What is meant by this is that you win by checkmate — your opponent can no longer get through your Substitute because of a combination of status-effects and stat-boosts, letting you boost into a sweep with impunity.
The set in question is, of course, Sleep Powder / Substitute / Quiver Dance / Hurricane, and it even saw some play early on in SWSH with the likewise Compound Eyes-endowed Butterfree, but opposing Max Airstream momentum and game timer issues (15 minute total for the first few seasons) saw to it that it was simply outclassed as a win-condition to want to play for.
Unlike Greninja and Breloom, of course, playing for a Vivillon endgame tends to take fairly dedicated set-up. To make things even more straight forward than in USUM, however, a major boon for Vivillon this time around is the lack of Tapu Koko and Tapu Fini, whose terrains prevent Sleep Powder.
For the record, here is perhaps the most influential example of how Vivillon mode was built in USUM: blog, pokepaste.
3) In Conclusion
That's it for now; housekeeping done. All we can do is wait and hope the developers deliver a game whose competitive aspects are an improvement over SWSH when the ranked ladder opens in December. And, come what may, I'll be here to cover it.
- Tox
SW-0021-9848-8999
