Community POTW #105

[unknownunown]

The WEAsel's VILE Choice
-Ice Punch (Breed or tutor)/Ice Shard (Preevo Lv 51 or breed)
-Night Slash
-Ice Punch/Ice Shard/Brick Break/Aerial Ace/X-Scissor
-Ice Shard/Brick Break/Aerial Ace/X-Scissor
Pressure
Jolly or Adamant
Choice Scarf or Band
252 Atk, 252 Spd, 4 HP
So, if my puns are still deemed silly, I'm gonna need tips to make good ones. Whatever... Choice is used a lot, right? Better have a bulky ally, as Choice forces you to switch often. Too bad it can't learn U-Turn but... Whatever... Ice Punch and Night Slash are for STAB. If you're confident on great attack plus Choice Band you can also run Ice Shard for STAB and priority, but... Whatever. Brick Break rids you of Rock and Steel, deals with other Ice or Dark Pokémon and gets good coverage independently. Aerial Ace deals with Bugs and Fight-types somewhat (better use it with Choice Band). X-Scissor is a good option, but... Your STAB moves cover almost everything it can... Whatever... Scarf to outrun the game... Almost. Band to hit harder. Of course I said "Whatever..." a lot but... Whatever...
Serebii, sometimes you can say, instead of outrun or outspeed, something like "outfly" or "outswim", if you like.

[unknownunown]

Punish the opponent
-Swagger
-Punishment
-Brick Break/Aerial Ace/Ice Punch/Night Slash/Protect
-Brick Break/Aerial Ace/Ice Punch/Night Slash/Protect
Pressure
Help me with EV's and item please
Risky, but may work. The idea is to raise the opponent's Attack to power up Punishment, but is risky with your low Defense. You may need Protect. Brick Break and Aerial Ace can hit what Punishment can't.

[Ghosts of the Forums]

Punish the opponent
-Swagger
-Punishment
-Brick Break/Aerial Ace/Ice Punch/Night Slash/Protect
-Brick Break/Aerial Ace/Ice Punch/Night Slash/Protect
Pressure
Help me with EV's and item please
Risky, but may work. The idea is to raise the opponent's Attack to power up Punishment, but is risky with your low Defense. You may need Protect. Brick Break and Aerial Ace can hit what Punishment can't.

that is horrible. swagger and punishment are both crap in competitive play.

and just do max atk and spe jolly. never use protect, it's risky to use on defensive pokemo let alone just plain horrible on offensive pokes like weavile.

[Furret Master]

Pokemon covered: Weavile

Overview:
Weavile is properly described as a "glass cannon." Base 120 Attack and Base 125 Speed means that Weavile hits pretty hard and hits quite fast. Dark/Ice also gets pretty good offensive coverage, and Weavile has good coverage moves to close the gaps. Sadly, it's typing makes it weak to Bug, Fire, Rock, Steel, and doubly weak to Fighting, which is common. It is also vulnerable to all forms of entry hazards, especially being weak to Stealth Rock. Defensively, 70/65/85 is not very exceptional, meaning that Weavile cannot last very long. Although it might sport weak defensives, typing, and moves, Weavile has the raw power to help cover its weaknesses and decimate teams that aren't ready for it.

Abilities:
Pressure: Moves that target Weavile use 2 PP instead of 1 PP. Not a great ability for a frail Pokemon like Weavile, but it can still help with low accuracy moves that threaten your team.
Pickpocket: Whenever the opponent makes physical contact with Weavile, Weavile steals the foe's hold item unless Weavile is holding an item already. Kind of gimmicky, but it can work on sets that utilize items like Gems and Focus Sash.

Movesets:

Pure Offense
-Ice Punch
-Night Slash/ Pursuit
-Low Kick/ Brick Break
-Ice Shard
Item: Choice Band/ Life Orb
Ability: Pressure
Nature: Jolly
EVs: 4 HP, 252 Attack, 252 Speed

This set takes Weavile's great offense and boosts it further. Ice Punch and Night Slash are the strongest STAB moves Weavile has. Night Slash even has a higher cricital-hit chance, which might help Weavile out in a pinch. Pursuit, however, can make Weavile into a good trapper, especially against Psychic and Ghost-types. Low Kick or Brick Break give great Fighting coverage. The choice comes down to reliability. Brick Break will always has Base 75 power and break through Reflect and Light Screen, while Low Kick has variable power that can be better against Pokemon like Tyranitar and Snorlax. Ice Shard rounds off the set by giving Weavile a priority attack to help it pick off opponents that are faster or who also carry priority attacks.

The item choice depends on if you want more power or more flexibility. Choice Band locks Weavile into its move, but gives more a larger power boost, while Life Orb allows Weavile to switch moves at the cost of some HP and power. Choice Band can be superior due to the fact that Weavile's frailty combined with Life Orb recoil can make Weavile's survivability decrease. Jolly nature is used to boost Weavile's Speed. Adamant could be used instead to boost Weavile's Attack further, but it is generally inferior due to Weavile's frailty and need to strike first. EVs max out Attack and Speed, with the 4 going into HP.

Team Leader Weavile
-Fake Out
-Ice Shard
-Pursuit
-Low Kick
Item:Focus Sash/Normal Gem
Ability:Pickpocket
Nature:Jolly
EVs: 4 HP, 252 Attack, 252 Speed

This is a very gimmicky lead set, which is gimmicky because leads are very rare nowadays. The point of this set is to attempt to pick off an opponent's lead or first Pokemon. Fake Out starts off with big priority and causing the opponent to flinch. Ice Shard is STAB priority, while Pursuit is STAB used to hit switching-out Pokemon for double damage. Finally, Low Kick is there for coverage.

The item choice is dependent on if you want Weavile to be guaranteed to not by knocked out in one hit or if you want to boost Fake Out's power. In either situation, the opponent could trigger Pickpocket with a contact move and nerf them by causing Weavile to most likely keep their hold item. The nature and EVs are them same as before.

Other Options:
-A Swords Dance set is perfectly viable.
-If you want to be super gimmicky, a Nasty Plot set with Ice Beam, Dark Pulse, and Hidden Power Fighting/Surf could be used. This is a terrible idea, however, as Weavile's base 45 Sp. Attack means that Weavile needs 3 boosts for him to be even remotely powerful. Besides, base 120 Attack is too good to pass up.

Counters:
Entry hazards. Entry hazards will make Weavile's already low survivability even less, especially if you can keep forcing it to switch. Fast Choice-Scarfers can be useful, especially if they carry their own priority. Bulky Fighting-types are good at taking out Weavile, especially if they carry Mach Punch for times when Weavile is not using Ice Shard. Hitmontop is great because it carries Intimidate, and Conkeldurr is a good choice if Weavile is in OU. In many cases, though, Weavile will be able to do a lot of damage before it gets taken down, so it is important to deal with it before it causes too much trouble.

[Rayofquazar]

Weavile is a scary pokemon, and one of the best late game cleaners in the game... OK, it's kind of frail, and has tons of weaknesses, but weavile makes up for that with a wonderful attack/speed stats and a good coverage priority move in the form of ice shard making it one of the safest choices for revenge killing dragonite after multiscale have been broken not to mention the other dragons like garchomp, salamence and flygon in UU. What breaks weavile a little it it's lack of useful abilities (I think this pokemon would apreciate something like guts or even magic guard). It's two abilities are useless each one in it's own merits and both designed somewhat for defensive sturdy wall rather than a frail physical sweeper. Pressure consumes one extra PP from moves used against weavile while pickpocket steals opponent's item if weaviles is not holding any and gets attacked by a physical attack. Both abilities requires weavile to take hits to work while one neutral hit will mean that it will suffer a lot!

Ice/Dark is rather a unique type combination reserved only to sneasel and weavile. It has a very good offensive coverage but on the other side, cripples them with a lot of weaknesses includind a 4x weakness to fighting type attacks one of the most commonly used attacking types in the game which also contains mach punch and vacuum wave as priority moves that decimates weavile (and sneasel) in one blow! Nevertheless, weavile has the movepool to be efficient, and when every threat to it has been eliminated, there is no stopping to weavile as it is, like i said before, one of the best late game sweepers in the game, taking out weakened foes and finishing them cleanly and quickly.

Sneasel works the same, for an unevolved pokemon, it boast great stats and very good BST. As a pre-evolution, it has the privilege of holding eviolite for a boost in defenses, but sneasel, apreciates other items like choice band, expert belt or focus sash more cause it was not made to defend just like it's bigger brother.

Weavile's set (creative I know!)
Ability: Won't matter anyways but pressure is always the better one as weavile will be holding an item.
Item: Choice band/Muscle band/Expert belt
Nature: +ATT/-Sp ATT or +Speed/-Sp ATT (depends on what you are going to use weavile for.)
Evs: 252 ATT/ 252 Speed/ 4 HP
Moveset:
-Ice punch
-Ice shard
-Brick break
-Night slash
Straightforward damage inflictor set... kill whatever you can before you die. Choice band is a bad idea if you are using this weavile as a late game sweeper. Ice punch covers grass, ground, flying and notably dragon types. Ice shard is for the 4x weak to ice especially the dragon/flying or the dragon/ground types. Night slash is another stab that hits psychic and ghost types. Brick break assures perfect coverage with night slash and finishes off a weakened blissey or chansey and other normal, rock, steel, ice and dark typed pokemon. With this moveset, weavile can hit 11 different types with super effective damage. Cool huh?

Beware from bullet punch, mach punch and vacuum wave as these moves will usually OHKO weavile... Scizor remains enemy nb 1 for weavile as it resists everything bar a neutral rather weak brick break and has the lethal bullet punch to hit it strong!

[sbktdreed]

If Weavile, Pressure
If Sneasel, Keen Eye
Item: Life Orb
Adamant w/ 252 Attack, 252 Speed, 5 HP
Night Slash/Bite/Shadow Claw
Ice Punch
Aerial Ace (against Fighting-types)
Brick Break/Low Sweep/Low Kick (against Steel-types)

Partners
Justified-users if Beat Up is used.
Quick Guard-users.

Countering
A high-defense pokemon with Fighting/Fire/Bug/Rock/Steel-type moves like Solid Rock Carracosta, Ferrothorn, Metagross, Sand Force Gigalith, Flamethrower Weezing, Brick Break/Superpower Kingler, Hammer Arm Sudowoodo, Scrafty, Swarm Durant/Escavalier/Scizor, Sniper Drapion, Heat Rotom, Kabutops, Justified Lucario, Infernape, or Armaldo.

[Miror]

If Weavile, Pressure
If Sneasel, Keen Eye
Item: Muscle Band/Life Orb
Adamant w/ 252 Attack, 252 Speed, 5 HP
Night Slash
Ice Punch
Aerial Ace (against Fighting-types)
Brick Break/Low Sweep (against Steel-types)

Partners
Justified-users if Beat Up is used.
Safeguard-users
Quick Guard-users

Countering
A high-defense pokemon with Fighting/Fire/Bug/Rock/Steel-type moves like Solid Rock Carracosta, Ferrothorn, Metagross, Sand Force Gigalith, Flamethrower Weezing, Brick Break/Superpower Kingler, Hammer Arm Sudowoodo, Scrafty, Swarm Durant/Escavalier/Scizor, Sand Stream Tyranitar, Sniper Drapion, Heat Rotom, Kabutops, Justified Lucario, Infernape, or Armaldo.

A few problems with this set, for one thing Aerial Ace is not going to hit most Fighting types hard enough to result in them being KO'd (besides the fact that Weavile staying in on a fighting type is a horrible idea), so it's essentially a waste of a moveslot. For the fighting move, I'd throw in Low Kick as another option as it hurts things like Ferrothorn, Heatran and Tyranitar (if you even stay in) more than the other two, and probably just have Life Orb and not Muscle Band. Countering Weavile and/or Sneasel doesn't require particularly high defense if you have the right typing, because they don't get much coverage. In OU, the main counters it will see would be Scizor, Ferrothorn (even Low Kick doesn't do all that much), Conkeldurr, Infernape, Keldeo, Jirachi, and Forretress all come to mind. For it's UU counters, Hitmontop, Arcanine, Bronzong and Escavalier all are decent all-use counters to Weavile. For partners, Safeguard and Quick Guard are pretty unusable (Quick Guard could be useful for doubles I guess, but most priority users like Scizor and Conkeldurr have other moves that will KO Weavile or Sneasel anyhow), and Justified users + Beat Up are once again a doubles strategy, so if anything this would go under Double and Triple battle startegies rather than partners (which also deals with single battle partners).

For Sneasel specifically, Inner Focus will be the better option than Keen Eye, just to save you from the occasional flinch while many do not use accuracy dropping moves. Sneasel is put in a hard spot being banned from LC but not very good in the remainder of the tiers, so it'll be interesting to see how it functions in NU, but it's pretty likely not to be used in other tiers.

[Color™]

Weavile@Choice Band
252/252
Att/Spd
Jolly
-Ice Shard
-Pursuit / Night Slash
-Low Kick / Brick Break
-Ice Punch

[Luthor]

If Weavile, Pressure
If Sneasel, Keen Eye
Item: Life Orb
Adamant w/ 252 Attack, 252 Speed, 5 HP
Night Slash
Ice Punch
Aerial Ace (against Fighting-types)
Brick Break/Low Sweep/Low Kick (against Steel-types)

Partners
Justified-users if Beat Up is used.
Quick Guard-users.

Countering
A high-defense pokemon with Fighting/Fire/Bug/Rock/Steel-type moves like Solid Rock Carracosta, Ferrothorn, Metagross, Sand Force Gigalith, Flamethrower Weezing, Brick Break/Superpower Kingler, Hammer Arm Sudowoodo, Scrafty, Swarm Durant/Escavalier/Scizor, Sniper Drapion, Heat Rotom, Kabutops, Justified Lucario, Infernape, or Armaldo.

unfortunately i don't think snesel gets night slash it'sphysical dark options are bite,pursuit,punishment or beat up.