Other "The Offensive Bias."

[Ajwf]

I know a lot of people keep preaching this "stall is dead" nonsense or "too many strong threats to stall" and it does get old, even for someone who religiously runs stall. Now, kan I can understand banning. He is superb against hyper offense as well as stall. Even mega lucario is a tough nut to crack, to an extent. I mean, it might not even be incorrect to say that stall is hurting a bit right now, but to the extent it has been said, this is nonsense. At 2% usage, I can't imagine all the people complaining about stall being 'dead' or non-functioning actually playing stall.

Even lucario can be stopped, if you're careful about it. I'm testing today to see if AV slowbro with a designated EV spread can take both physical and special lucario at +2. I already know he can take on physical mega lucario fairly well and the special side attacks have slightly less base power. Gyarados can hold his own for the most part as well, and I don't think he needs an assault vest to do so. Tentacruel hard walls special lucario, though I have to check how it stops physical luc (guessing not well). In all honesty, mega lucario is no worse than kyurem was last generation.

If anything, throwing in a fast revenge killer like last generation's idea of stall may help. Outspeed mega lucario seems a tad difficult, but a perfectly viable Starmie sits ready for stall to use, not only outspeeding, but resisting both stabs and providing offensive/spin support to the team. Need I remind you starmie has access to recovery? If you can do about 1/4 damage to lucario beforehand, starmie can guarantee a kill. And if you simply want to fake being timid and go analytic LO, you can OHKO with psychic after rocks every time (and have a 93% chance to do so without anyways). This gives you room to make starmie bulky while focusing on attack. Tornadus comes to mind with his 121 base speed and regenerator. He should OHKO with LO heatwave or just focus miss. With prior damage (approximately 14%) he can KO with super power, no LO needed. Support azelf can do the same, lead taunting, setting rocks and then using fire blast to target/OHKO mega lucario. Yes, it has to invest max speed (or near, at least) and max SpA, but Azelf's support slot is generally a fast variant for taunting purposes.

There are options, and some of the fast pokes even play support roles well enough. You just have to adapt a bit. I'm not sure what Lucario's suspecting will bring, I've already decided to try and help that one and give as unbiased an opinion I can. Unviable for stall? Not really, there is some adapting that needs to take place but when I build a team, I'm not looking to fit some mold of what is viable, I will make my team viable in itself.

 

[effyouzion]

I mean, if you're running safe switch on stall, you literally give away the win every time because everyone knows what the safe switch is. I personally judge how long I can make a safe switch and then throw wrenches in my patterns. Sure, you can auto-pilot, but that doesn't get a stall player to be anything better then average. Prediction is everything in stall, and to play at the utmost high tier of stall (which this gen probably isn't quite that high yet), you need to be predicting and evaluating risk/reward on every move. It is difficult to do right every turn, hence the belief in just safe-playing games.

I'm not trying to downplay the prediction aspect of stall, but I feel like when games only last 20 turns (offensive teams), making a wrong prediction on turn 6 can be really painful. With stall, your games last 60+ turns, so one misplay probably won't cost you the game. You also have multiple pokes to take hits and potential recovery, so switching your Skarmory into a Mawile fire fang early on might not mean the end of your steel bird. You can go to your backup to take care of Mawile (Heatran, Lando, Suicune), then switch Skarm in on an earthquake later on and recover with roost.

 

[Ajwf]

Then the art of stall becomes finding how to recover that skarmory before another physical threat like LO lucario gets in to attack you. One of my favorite non-stall tactics was a double-breaker strategy, that had three sweepers and three clearers, and each clear/sweeper set had an overlapping type. The idea was to incapacitate the check/counter to that pokemon with the clearer and then simply sweep. The same strategy would make stall pay for making that mistake.

 

[Monte Cristo]

People who say standard good ol' stall is dead are for the most part just lazy, I've built plenty of XY stall teams in the time that I've had, now for the people that know me know I don't "ladder" (as in to try and get #1 or something like that)= at all so don't even bother about my score, but I honestly believe stall isn't dead, it's just we have to bring it to the next level: The next gen, for example here was my most recent stall team:
Phys Def MegaSaur
Mixed Tank Swampert
Phys Def Cresselia
Spdef Florges
Spdef Heatran
Hazards Ferro

Not too odd ball, all pretty logical sets, mixed tank swampert is the real stick out here: you see, this is my 100% aegislash check, it can survive 2 LO quiet max SpA EVd Shadow Balls form the mixed sets back to back and it lives about 2 LO sacred swords from the SD set, and since shadow sneak is weaker, no need to explain here:
252+ SpA Life Orb Aegislash Shadow Ball vs. 240 HP / 132+ SpD Swampert: 179-212 (44.63 - 52.86%) -- guaranteed 3HKO
252+ Atk Life Orb Aegislash Sacred Sword vs. 240 HP / 124 Def Swampert: 149-177 (37.15 - 44.13%) -- 99.98% chance to 3HKO
252+ Atk Life Orb Aegislash Shadow Sneak vs. 240 HP / 124 Def Swampert: 99-118 (24.68 - 29.42%) -- possible 5HKO

This team has fairly done well and has managed multiple HUGE meta threats (kanga meet helmet ferro) while still stalling my way to victory, anyways, just wanted to spit some food for thought on the matter of stall

 

[Chou Toshio]

I'm going to lock this thread since it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. I think the OP got his answer-- there are a lot of players who refuse to experiment, but then there are also many others who do. The Pokemon he mentioned as "good but never used" are in fact well known and gaining popularity, if not top threats of their own right. If people want to argue about the viability of stall, or strategies for stall, it can be done in the stall thread.