A look at Pokemon usage at worlds in top 8.

[DanielJames]

(Aug 24, 2015, 12:45 AM)GMX Wrote: EmbC from Nugget Bridge:

"In my opinion, Japan and the rest of the world were playing different games in this tournament. I may be completely wrong, but I think the japanese mentality was having Landorus' intimidate and offensive pressure on the field at the exact right time while allowing heatran to do its job with Kangaskhan's help. The western players were trying to maybe outlead their opponents and cause pressure with the pokemon they had on the field.
Well, the japanese having a very fixed goal helped them out, since they had answers to most leads by setting up their own strategy or by simply switching out into intimidate and redirection supporters. Shuca berry and Intimidate made it almost impossible to OHKO those heatrans and, even though I wasn't there and this is simply based on MY conclusions taken from what I saw, I think players kind of ignored the threat of Sub Heatran, since western players are more used to that pokemon paired with other megas and the concept of sub steel-types wasn't very exploited throughtout the season. Beating sub heatran requires heavy pressure onto it on turn 1, since, otherwise, a double target will be necessary to KO it, which allows pokemon like Kangaskhan and Landorus to gain some momentum and start tearing apart the opposing team.

I also think that another problem may lie on the fact that players may have thought that, looking at how badly Kangaskhan did last year at worlds, no one would dare bringing it this time around, thus spending more time practicing versus other matchups and leaving the job of taking care of Kangaskhan to less effective pokemon, which makes things complicated when they have to pressure both kangaskhan and heatran, without straight up losing to amoonguss' spore spam and landorus' strong spread moves.

On another note, many players agree that this format relies a lot on lead matchup, since the presence of Mega's and legendary pokemon don't allow many pokemon to take moves upon switching into a better position, making "neutral" leads a very important part of a team in 2015. An example of this is the common "double genies" lead. With those 2, you can start paralysing opposing pokemon and u-turning out to try and counter the opposing leads, which is by itself a solid strategy and doesn't rely too much on the leading matchup.

I hope I'm not terribly wrong on this. I really just wanted to leave my thoughts here and I hope I get some counter-arguments to help me understand the situation a bit more as well."

You bring up a lot of great points. I just think that the competitive game is horribly imbalanced when you have everyone using the same six Pokémon when there are over 700 to chose from. Obviously not every single Pokémon is going to be competitive, but you'd think that AT LEAST 100 would be viable for competitive play. It's not fun to watch almost every player lead with Landorus and Thundurus. It's obviously an effective lead, but there has to be countless other viable leads. I just want to see some variation in the competitive scene. Notice how excited everyone got when that kid used Machamp. Imagine the entire tournament being like that.