Hey everybody. Ever since the announcement of the VGC17 ruleset I've been really interested in the format. With the recent leaks of the new Pokémon and mechanics and with sun and moon right around the corner I'd like to get people's opinions on the format before the release of sun and moon. Here is a fairly useful smogon thread of note worthy things. This is very outdated and takes in to account very few of the recent leaks. Hopefully it gets updated soon, but for now it still gives a good representation of the mons from previous gens that can be used. http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/spoilers-early-vgc-2017-interesting-pokemon.3585002/ So what do you think? Will you be playing much VGC this year? Are there any Pokémon/strategies that catch your eye? My first thoughts are for the most part it looks fairly well balanced and should be a pretty diverse metagame. There is a rather shockingly low number of viable priority users and speed control users, with icy wind being left to only frail ice types, viable tailwind users being limited to Whimsicott and Pelliper (at least for prior generations and disregarding new mons since I don't have a list of which mons get what), and trick room limited to Slowbro/king and Porygon2. Some Pokémon that catch my eye are Arcanine, with the incredible ability Intimidate, nice resistance to fairy, access to Extremespeed which seems very rare in this format, Helping Hand, Snarl, usuable physical and special attack, safeguard + swagger if you want to be that guy, Roar (most likely less useful this format, but who knows maybe trick room gets popular) and Morning Sun. Pelipper could be alright, though honestly there aren't many rain abusers in the format. I don't think any new swift swim users were introduced and the ones that are allowed are pretty pathetic, with probably Poliwrath maybe? Idk. There's certainly no Ludicolo or Kingdra. I suppose you could run something like absorb bulb Pelliper and Surf Golduck, but that seems gimmicky and one dimensional. Pelipper could just be nice as bulky tailwind support with 100% hurricanes and recovery. I like Whimsicott for its plethora of support options. Encore, Helping Hand, Fake Tears, Tailwind, Taunt, Swagger and a fairly strong Moonblast. Oh and Tapu Koko. That thing looks pretty damn good. 130 base speed to my knowledge outspeeds the entire unscarfed meta. I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of special Tapu Koko, considering Electric Terrain makes its thunderbolt still ridiculously strong, and Dazzling Gleam being its only Fairy STAB and being a nice spread move. People have been talking about the Alolan Raichu + Tapu Koko strat, which probably would be strong but while I think we'll probably end up seeing this spammed on release, the metagame will probably evolve to deal with it a bit better and make it less popular. Possibly Scarf Krookodile to spam strong EQs (if that even KOs) after living a hit from Raichu. Milotic might also be nice, considering there are quite a few decent Intimidate users like Incineroar, Arcanine, Salamence, Krookodile and Gyarados. Oh yeah, and Spinda and Arcanine are in the format. So yeah that strategy will win worlds... (don't even know if skill swap Spinda is allowed, probably not)
