Hello and welcome back to OM Interviews! For this round, we've brought in the definition of "first is the worst, second is the best"...
Hello Two z, and welcome to OM interviews! How are you doing today?
Hello I'm fine, haven't been up to much lately.
Sounds good. Starting off, would you like to tell us a bit about yourself?
Sure thing! I'm an 18 year old who hasn't entirely decided what I'm going to do with my life after graduating this past school year, although I'm currently interested in audio engineering. Currently in the process of looking for a job though, for now usually I'm just trapped inside on a pc/ps4 all day lol.
I feel that tbh. With that though, how did you get into PS & OMs?
Hm, I've been a pokemon fan since the day I got a copy of pokemon black quite a few years ago but I started wanting to play more than just for fun, so then I found Showdown. I think seeing the word "Hackmons" on one of the formats drew me into OM's as a whole seeing as it was different, and after playing a lot of games on the rom side server that I somehow stumbled upon, I began just playing a lot of the OM formats on showdown.
And what are some of your favourite OMs and why?
I think I value a bit of the lesser played OM's a lot as people probably know, Bonus Type has primarily been really fun for me because there's a lot of creativity and synergies you can create with a team by just adding an extra type to any mon. My other favorite is Shared Power and uh...well let's say because combining a whole bunch of abilities together at once causes destruction.
As part of Bonus Type's Council, how do you feel about the meta at the moment? Are there any older builds you'd like to show off for people trying to get into the meta?
I feel the meta is pretty solid at the moment, after getting rid of Kartana and single strike Urshifu who were just super restricting vs teams. I'm a bit conflicted with Kyurem's existence in the meta, as adding Ground to it makes switching into the sub roost set very difficult without very specific checks like Flying Heatran and such and removes its rock weakness. I also think Steel as a typing may be a bit ridiculous, as it offers much more ease in setup mons like Latias, Thundurus-I, Hydreigon, Salamence, etc, with usual counterplay to these mons such as Toxic or priority resisted by Steel (fair amount of them) being ineffective, restricting builds to deal with them.
https://pokepast.es/1b3dd9132e721816 This sample is usually my bread and butter for this format, capitalizes on fat setup with rocker Heatran as a Kyurem check for the team. It lacks speed control, but this team has the capability of sitting on a lot of offensive threats while not being passive.
https://pokepast.es/b70b047f323cc2c1 I also like this offense, which utilizes Flying Zeraora that tears certain teams apart without things like Electric Clefable, and Water Chomp to directly soften Lando for the team.
As well, with Bonus Type comes the OM Spotlight League! With your week 1 match just passing - how have you felt about your team so far?
I really like being a part of UwUrshifu's, we are doing pretty well and have basically already won week 1 so I feel that we are a strong and capable team. Also we have a couple of OM Mashups goons like Don Vascus, Eggs Mcgee, and The Number Man along with other cool teammates so the environment is really fun.
That's great to hear!! Going off experiences, how has your community experiences been so far? Are there any moments you remember fondly?
The community experience has been very good, I've been interacting with a lot of OM players lately and OMSL is probably one of the most fun tours I've been in. Getting into other tours for the more popular formats as well has been nice, along with being a part of the excellent and funny staff. I want to say that getting promoted to mod after my name change on PS! was bizarre to me, but if we are also going off of actual OM moments it's probably ruining every Shared Power room tour with Pigeon's annoying stall team.
Glad to see you're having a good time! Now, as part of the OM community, is there something you'd like to see from OMs in the future?
There's not exactly much I'd like to see actually, I think OM's are progressing at a steadily and healthy rate for what we can do, as I think dexit was a bit rough on a lot of them. Maybe more Community Create A Team projects to immerse new players into the meta and help them get an understanding of how to build teams properly and efficiently, although we may be hosting one for a popular format soon. I'd personally like to see more people try OM Mashups too, as I think people overcomplicate building for those metas, although that's a later topic.
Shifting focus then, how do you feel about OM mashups?
Funnily enough, I've ventured farther into OM Mashups before I did OM itself, I must really say I'm impressed with that community as well, along with being a part of the STAAABmons Council. I'd love to see more tours for the formats as TPP and OM Mashup trios have been really good about highlighting the popular formats in them, maybe even OMMPL eventually, fingers crossed on that one though. The room is a lot of fun and offers a ton of variety when you combine metas together, and the people there are all really chill. I'd love to do more with the room and try to get it more recognized as it really just is a good place to be, even if we are experiencing a bit of a burn out of activity with school starting.
What are some of your favourite mashups, and what are some teams you've built for them?
My favorite by far has been STAAAB (STABmons + Almost Any Ability), and PokeAAAbilities (Pokebilities + Almost Any Ability), I'll go into a bit for both.
https://pokepast.es/0875f2f716787f70 This is the STAAAB team I used in week 3 of TPP, it features a former AAA menace Aerilate Noivern, with an interesting pick that is Triage Heat Rotom. The play here was to bluff Magnet Pull which is often used to support Noivern and sweep an unsuspecting team with priority Parabolic Charge and Giga Drain instead, and thanks to STAB I can rid of the atrocious Overheat and rely on an actually good fire STAB, Blue Flare. There are also other cool adaptations, such as taking AAA's Swampert and giving it Thousand Waves, trapping certain threats and not being weakened by Grassy Glide without having to use High Horsepower and etc.
https://pokepast.es/f6932173402525fe This is a PokeAAAbilities team I used vs The Number Man, in the Trios tour. It feature's some pretty cool things, like Garchomp being able to punish physical attackers extremely hard due to Rocky Helmet + Rough Skin, but also switching into them repeatedly through a match due to having Regenerator as well. Or Sigilyph's ability to invalidate resists to wallbreak and annoy passive fat mons due to a combination of Magic Guard, Adaptability, and Tinted Lens. Lot's of pretty cool tech's fitted onto one team in my opinion.
Awesome! Moving on, is there something you see yourself doing in OMs in the future?
Apart from modding the room and potentially leading/developing a new OM myself, not much but I am always interested in helping with anything that comes up if I have the time for it.
For our penultimate question, are there any shoutouts you'd like to make?
I'd like to shoutout the community for being so awesome, as well as the mashups community, as well as the natdex community, postwick pults, uwurshifus, etc, but most importantly tnm for being better than me and inspiring me to build differently, cool guy when he's not beating me in like every friendly.
Finally, anything you'd like to say to the readers?
not really
Feel free to ask 23Gz questions below!