MOTW: Soak

Your opponent having a resistance against your current offense in a battle can ruin a strategy you have in place. You send out a Octillery first and your opponent sends out a grass type. s#&*... What if you could remove that advantage of typing? An underutilized strategy until now, here’s Soak.

Soak is a special water type move that has one purpose and one purpose only. To change your opponent's typing, no matter what it is, to water. Pretty sweet, huh? Soak was introduced in Gen V to a select amount of Pokemon. Roughly 10 or 15, but we’re going to focus a move set on one of, at least I think, sweetest Pokemon in the game, Golduck.

Just like nearly every other water Pokemon, Golduck is weak to Grass and Electric. So lets say you’re facing a Tangrowth. I would consider Tangrowth a relatively common choice for a grass type, as we see in in Featured Team every so often. There are two problems with this matchup. First, Golduck is weak to grass type moves. Tangrowth has the opportunity to have the Solar Beam, Sunny Day combo, which, with Tangrowth’s STAB bonus on that move, it is nearly guaranteed a OHKO against Golduck. Second, any STAB powered moves on Golduck’s end will do almost no damage to Tangrowth.

Let’s look at this situation again with Soak in place...

Solar Beam is still super effective against Golduck, there’s no changing that, but with Soak in effect Tangrowth is now water type. No more STAB. So Solar Beam loses that extra 50% boost, and you have a chance of actually living through an attack. Secondly, Tangrowth is now water type, and isn’t resistant against your STAB attacks. So let’s say Tangrowth still sets up the Sunny Day, Solar Beam combo. It needs one move to ready Sunny Day, and another to actually attack, giving you two moves to get out of your oh s#h* situation. Soak is your first move, just to prep you for what’s about to happen, and from there you have a couple of options. Golduck can learn Substitute, may not be a bad idea to get that up right away. First you can either go offensive, with something like a Surf now that it’s effective, or maybe even a Hydro Pump for a possible boost in power if you want to risk the 80% accuracy. If you go defensive I would highly recommend a Light Screen, so not only with Solar Beam do less damage, but you are also helping out your team against any possible special attacks.

Now Soak isn’t just an offensive move to be used on your opponent. What if you’re in a double battle? Soak will also change your ally’s typing to water as well if needed. How could this be effective? Well let’s take a look...

Let’s say we have Golduck again. We’re going to pair it up with a Rhydon here. Rhydon is normally 4x weak to water type moves, but if we use soak on it it changes it’s typing from ground/rock, to pure water type. A Rhydon that’s a water type... what can we do with this here... Well, it just so happens, for some idoiodic reason, that a normally ground/rock type Pokemon can actually learn Surf. Makes absolutely no sense, but this nonsense works towards our advantage here. Now that Rhydon is a pure water type and can learn Surf, not only is it STAB’ed, but Rhydon’s base attack is 130. Surf is going to do a hellofalotof damage.  

Not only now is Rhydon super powerful with Golduck, but it can also, just based on it’s normal move set, be super effective against water damaging types. Put Poison Jab on your Rhydon and boom, you have a physical attacking water based Rhydon, who can lay down the law on nearly anything it comes against. Just watch out for grass and electric types still, as those will still do a number on you, being a water type and all, but having earthquake at your disposal on Rhydon will also take care of any electric pests.

Soak can have a number of applications that it can be used in, but this is just one of them. It’s pretty sick, with the amount of combos with moves and Pokemon to choose from that normally wouldn’t be effective, Soak can be utilized to be one of the best offensive and defensive moves a water type Pokemon could have.

-aaronspriggs

-It’s Super Effective