MOTW: Sand Attack

A move that we all love to hate, Sand Attack has become quite the joke here on our podcast, and has been an internet meme for the longest time as well. For good reason. It s freaking annoying. How frustrating is it when you can t kill a f-ing Pidgey just because you can't even hit the stupid thing!?

I've talked about accuracy before. If you want to know the importance of accuracy within a battle you can go back and look at Swift and see how important it is to use offensively, now I m going to show you a little bit about how to use it defensively.

So, you had a ton of sand thrown in your face. How can you prevent this from happening ever again? There are a couple of options. The easiest option is to have pokemon that have specific abilities that either prevent against speed loss, or some how counteract it. The best ability to have against an accuracy lowering move like Sand Attack would be Keen Eye. Plain and simple, if Keen Eye is your ability your accuracy cannot be lowered. The specific list of Pokemon that can have Keen Eye as an ability is right here, but some of the more popular ones that can learn it are Hitmonchan and Sneasel. 

Another great ability that can be utilized particularly well is No Guard. What this does is that it makes every Pokemon in play have 100% accuracy. Now, the only pokemon to have this ability so far is the evolutionary line of Machamp, but there is another evolution set that is being introduced in Gen V later this year that will have it, Goruggu.

Now No Guard really isn't too useful if you have anything other than a Machamp, but, there are a couple of accuracy effecting items that you may also want to take a look at.

One of the most popular items to use to boost a couple of accuracy lacking moves is Wide Lens. I m actually utilizing it on my Salamence for my final team to boost both Draco Meteor and Overheat s accuracy all the way up to 100%, BUT even if you have a move with 100%, if your accuracy has been lowered by a sand attack your accuracy will increase for a move with normally 100% accuracy. Thus, technically making a move with 110% accuracy, which counteracts a stage drop in accuracy %

Another item which I don t see all that often is Zoom Lens. What this little baby does is, if you move after your opponent, your accuracy for the move you have chosen will increase. This is a very useful item for slower Pokemon

If you have a phobia of Sand Attack, or would prefer to actually hit your opponent once in a while in battle, you may want to take some of these precautions to your team, or consider having one of your team s Pokemon actually knowing once of these abilities, or holding one of these items. They could make the difference between getting that last hit off just to KO your opponents pokemon, and him holding on to 2 HP while he slowly kills your entire team because you just couldn t gosh darn hit him!!

Sand Attack. Buy it now. Lower your friends accuracy. Or just really tick them off.

- It s Super Effective (and super annoying, like, really freaking annoying...)

- aaronspriggs