Only doin a few sorry
- Own Tempo/Mirror Armor
- How impactful is improving our Landorus-T matchup over losing our Water immunity?
- Own Tempo helps remove Hurricane hax and Mirror Armor helps against Astrolotl and Dragapult. Are these perks, combined with the Intimidate answer, enough to be used over Water Absorb?
There's a real angle of "we can bluff Water Absorb while running these two" but once the gig is up we're a lot weaker against many teams. So if we come in on a pivot into their Water type, they're very likely to not try and hit us with our potential immunity, but if our Ability is triggered via Intimidate (or, for Mirror Armor, any stat drop), we get a short-term benefit but lose out on the long-term benefits of Water Absorb.
For Own Tempo I do feel that the additional insurance against Hurricane confusions is very nice, especially as an element of the Ability the opponent can't really scout for given it's a 30% chance assuming cane even hits at all. Immunity to Intimidate is nice for offensive sets as you're able to pressure Lando a lot more.
252+ Atk Life Orb Silvally-Ground Diamond Storm vs. 252 HP / 4 Def Landorus-Therian: 161-190 (42.1 - 49.7%) -- 27.3% chance to 2HKO after Stealth Rock and Leftovers recovery
Beyond that a Lando sack late-game is only going to provide a free switch instead of neuter you offensively, which is nice.
Mirror Armor feels like a good choice because it has both a lot of upsides considering the frequency of stat-drops in the metagame, and especially of Pokemon we're likely to come in on/switch into us. Turning something like Lando into a setup opportunity thanks to Mirror Armor is genuinely very useful, as is not being compromised by an untimely Defense/Special Defense drop. I also really like how this interacts with Fini's Moonblast, as that's going to be what we want to switch into or encourage it using, but Moonblast is also a move that can reveal our Ability.
I do think that against certain structures being able to significantly chip/KO Lando is important and leveraging our ability to dissuade Water-type moves into us on preview alone would give it value being run on occasion, which is really all I'd want from a Secondary.
- Unaware
- What specific threats does Unaware enable CAP31 to beat?
Big target here is going to be Venomicon. SD can obviously get us far but if we want 31 to threaten an already-boosted Venom, Unaware is the only real way of doing so. It gives us the ability to both switch into it easier and actually threaten it out, which is not easy for a lot of mons. There's more things it helps in (cm koko, bu zera, pyroak to an extent, any defense booster) but I'd say the main focus here is that we're much better at dealing with Venom.
- Serene Grace
- What effect does scouting play with Serene Grace? Is it a problem if players cannot tell if the opposing CAP31 has Serene Grace, or was just lucky?
We talked about this for a good bit today on VC; if our abilities are Water Absorb and Serene Grace, then the tell between the two is that Diamond Storm fails to boost: otherwise there isn't a way of knowing, as 50% odds of getting a boost are quite high when considering how many separate matches Diamond Storm will be used in. It honestly isn't unreasonable to see Diamond Storm boost three times in a row: 12.5% chance isn't high in a single-game setting, but across multiple games it's going to happen. It does become more likely to be Serene Grace the more you get a boost, but by nature the only guarantee is that a boost doesn't happen.
This sort of situation means that you could run Serene Grace and benefit from the knowledge that you have 100% boost chance on a successful hit (still 95% accurate) while still bluffing the potential of Water Absorb.
I'm honestly not too much of a fan of this dynamic: I feel like we'd want our secondary to give up something important for us, but with the
threat of Water Absorb being the biggest selling point, what's going to stop Serene Grace from giving us the benefit of an effective 95% boost rate while also still dissuading Water Absorb? Really the only thing would be pattern observation and meta knowledge: if Serene Grace is standard then you can probably assume its not Water Absorb, but then complacency would leave the doors open for Water Absorb to come back.
Part of me feels this isn't a huge issue but it's also not a design that sits with me well. At this point, I'd much prefer Water Absorb remain our go-to and have our Secondary be something the opponent is readily able to figure out, which would make bluffs harder to pull off.
- Heatproof
- How distinct is CAP31 with Heatproof from Garchomp, another Ground-type with a Fire resist?
Mono-Ground versus Ground/Dragon has a lot of implications, but I think the big one is that we match-up a lot better into Fairy. Specifically Garchomp doesn't want to come in on Fini, but 31 is quite comfortable, and Fini is just as common and splashable a mon as Heatran, which is a main target for Heatproof. Obviously, if we pick one Ability, the other mon becomes more problematic. But until we've revealed our Ability, Fini doesn't want to mindlessly go for Water STAB, which gives us opportunities to come in even with Heatproof, while retaining our extra resistance to Fire when the time comes. This goes further with 31 being quite good into Koko whereas Garchomp, at best, needs to be kept quite healthy to tank a hit.
There is a good amount of overlap between these two but I do feel it's fine, if Heatproof 31 is just a sort of lure set that's generally worse than Chomp but can get the jump on the opponent, I think that's an okay Secondary to have.