MOTW: Guillotine

Your dead. That’s it. It’s over. You were taken out in one hit. “How’s that even fraking possible!!?” You ask yourself. “I had a substitute on a Blissy with full health!!!” It’s totally possible. Welcome to Guillotine.

Guillotine is one of four moves in the entire game that can make nearly anything faint on contact. Pretty brutal. 

You: “So what do you mean it can faint on contact?”

Me: “It works like this. Guillotine ignores all changes to accuracy and evasion stats and the accuracy of Guillotine depends on the level of the user, and the level of the target. It is worked out with the formula: 

Accuracy = ((level of user - level of target) + 30)%.”

“Really? That’s it?”

“Yup. Pretty much. This is the same formula that works for two of the other OHKO (one hit knock out) moves, Fissure and Horn Drill.”

“Oh... Good to know.”

That’s the way that it’s calculated. So lets make sense of this formula and I’ll break it down for ya. So the accuracy of the move itself is 30%, BUT, if you have a higher level than your opponent your accuracy goes up 1 per level. So lets say you have a level 90 Pinsir. If you were facing a level 80 Pikachu you would have a 40% chance of OHKO’ing the little rat. Not bad, but not the type of move you want to leave by itself on a moveset. The only instance where it would be a constant fallback move would be if you were roughly 70 levels higher than you opponent... With kind of accuracy you could go back to New Bark Town and totally PWN THOSE FREAKING PIDGEYS!!!!!! GUILLOTINE THEIR @$$e$!!!!

Sorry, had a little relapse there... Anyways... A little history lesson here. So Guillotine, Horn Drill, and Fissure were introduced way back in the day in Gen I, and only ONE other OHKO move has been introduced since then. In Gen III Sheer Cold was introduced, and is the only non-normal type move that can OHKO. The only difference other than their typing is that Sheer Cold doesn’t break a Substitute. Definitely a huge drawback. Being able to break Substitute with the combination of a OHKO makes the original three a major possibility of a fall back move for any Pokemon that can learn them.

So what Pokemon can actually learn Guillotine? I already mentioned one, but there are a number of others as well. Krabby, Kingler, Pinsir, Gilgar, Corphish, Crawdaunt, and Gliscor. Not too many. The reason why I’m making it move of the week is because there really is no moves that can take down almost anything, plus nearly all the Pokemon that can learn it look freaking awesome. We do see Pinsir on Featured teams from time to time, so it’s definitely a possibility for people looking to put together a moveset for it. Also later down the line in Gen V there are 5 more Pokemon being introduced that can learn Guillotine, and they look like they’ll be pretty popular ones.

That’s it! Take a look at putting it on your team, and take a look at the other two main OHKO moves, Horn Drill and Fissure, since they work identically to Guillotine and see if they might be a last resort move for your team.

If you have any comments, like always you can submit them below, OR you can email us at pokemonpodcast@me.com. While you’re at it rate us in iTunes too! We still have the contest for the Pikachu charger going but we can’t give it away until we hit 100 reviews!

Thanks again and...

-It’s Super Effective (In Guillotine’s case it’s REALLY super effective, like, dead effective)

-aaronspriggs