As always, I can't sleep so I figured I would waste my night writing stuff here. I will present the team Ive built for the finals and talk in depth about the game.
As we've reached finals, I was arriving at a point where I had no more ideas to explore, Ive been building all my teams for this wcop (bar the one vs germany) since the tiebreak game against separation so I was just feeling exhausted as fuck. Earlier in the tour I tried to make a glowking team two times, but I ended up being not satisfied with the result so I went with something else. I felt like the final week would be the one to finally try to make it work. The team was built around the Nasty plot set with psyshock as the only stab and flamethrower-scald for the coverage. This set has already been brought by Italy and I thought it would be a good idea as people completely stopped playing slowbro/slowking. The idea of the team is to have a good matchup against most offenses thanks to the solid defensive core while also being good against fat stuff with this glowking set. To be honest It's probably the team Ive tested the least in the tournament so maybe it has it issues but all my tests games went pretty well and it seemed good when I was theorizing so yea. Now moving into the game :
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen8ou-637962
So I obviously wanted to slap my head as I saw the Slowking at the team preview but It's funny how I had to face the team Ive always considered as one of the most brokens in the meta since the very beginning of the tour. In fact I peaked top 5 on the ladder many times with it and managed to push my mates to play it for 1 or 2 games in the tour (think they both won too), I think BluBird made it so all credits goes to him. Good thing is I knew most of the sets but I still had to be carefull incase some of them got changed.
Turn 4 : I had no others choices than risking the burn on buzzwole, I had to toxic Slowking as it would open the gate for glowking, Heatran and dragonite too. Getting Buzz burnt is super annoying but not the end of the world as I still had dnite to check shifu.
Turn 7 : I stayed with Glowking fishing for the scald burn figuring it would've been very good for my Koko and It's the best thing my glowking set could've done in this game.
Turn 10 : Now that Slowking is toxiced, my gameplan against fsight port was to go Dnite and dragon dance to force him to go Zapdos, which then allows heatran to come in, absorb the fsight and rocks up.
Turn 19 : I figured it would've been a good time for him to taunt and kill my Buzzwole so I tried to damage the Shifu as much as possible, then I had no others choices than sacking it to pult and this when I started worrying about how I would win this.
Turn 33 : With Lando being this low with rocks up, I figured I had to do something with Koko in order to win, thankfully I brought it against Zapdos on a hurricane miss and not on volt switch/toxic. Basically from here I knew I had to get every plays right, one single play wrong would've been more than bad, and I did by toxicing the Heatran, looking back at it hard Landorus into dgleam would've been omega bad for him so Heatran was a good play. I went for toxic bc I thought it would cover the zapdos staying trying to toxic me and the Lando switch but it didnt work.
Turn 36 : I made another bad play here, I switched Dnite into Lando because I thought it would've been a good play trying to cover wisp/toxic/Zapdos switch, but like why not sending in Lando directly instead of Dnite at the end of turn 35. At the end of the day it did not really matter thankfully.
Turn 40 : Koko got toxiced but at this point I had to let it take it so I was fine with that.
Turn 44 : Probably the most important turn in the game as this double into Koko allows me a sequence that leads me to make a kill, so Im up 4 mons against 3 now, which is huge.
Turn 50 : This is the famous turn that changed everything. My opponent, unfortunately for him, missclicked. Im not going to lie I was very happy to see lando coming in instead of Pult as It's a final game, every win is more than important and the game was very difficult to play for me. So I thought I was just going to win from here as Pult had to click Draco to kill Dnite. But it ended up being Hex. I knew it was modest Pult but now that I saw hex I had doubts, whatever, It was no use to calc I had to go koko and pray for it and thanks god it was not Timid so I won.
But the analysis doesn't stop here, after the game ended I tried to recreate it imagining what would happen as my opponent didnt missclick.
If we had the ideal scenario of Pult vs Dnite turn 51 and he would just kill me with hex, I would went koko next still praying that It's not timid and kill the Pult. Then his Lando was coming in to kill my koko as I dazzling geam it to put it at the knock off range from my Lando. So I think at the end, the game would've been decided on a Landorus speed tie ? Not completely sure, I had speed on mine and I dont know about his so I guess we'll never know, but yea I just thought it was great to analyse it with the non missclick scenario as it would've been a very very good game either way.
I'll also quickly talk about one of my favorites teams :
It's a revamp of the team I've made against Eo in R1 with Victini > Volcanion, it worked pretty well against him so I figured it would work against South again in semis against samqian. The idea of the team was to spam hazards and make sure to keep them up thanks to the double taunt on Victini & Tornadus. 4 mons are not affected by hazards and one of Clef's role is to absorb knock off so that you'll never lose your boots with the others 3. This team can be very difficult to use in some matchups but I do think that most of them are manageable.
Also wanted to talk about what is in my opinion one of the most broken set of the SS metagame :
This is what we called "demon clef" in the France server. The set is self explanatory, It's just a machine at making progress. At worse you're gonna thunder wave something which is already big. Fun fact : You can also 1v1 Heatran with that set (if he doesn't have taunt). If he magmas trying to trap Clef you can just twave it and spam soft boiled fishing for a para as he is heavy slamming into your rocky helmet taking 17% damages each times.
Feeling tired now so I'll eventually go to sleep, thanks for reading.