MOTW: Foul Play
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Battling against nearly 25 or 30 people this last weekend for gym leader tryouts made me see a lot of what people are doing now-a-days to try and get an edge up in flat battles. I saw Stealth Rock combinations, the use of Toxic, burning moves, Trick Room, but one that really caught my eye, and worked particularly well against me with my heavy hitting team was Foul Play. It’s not to difficult of a move to understand, but lets go over it, shall we?
Foul Play was only just introduced in Gen V and has really started to take a high position of favor amongst competitive battles. It’s a dark type move, and what it does is it uses your own power against you. Let’s break it down here:
Basically, let's run two scenarios.
You have Zoroark with a base Attack 105, for example's sake. If you were to use Foul Play on a Slaking with a base Attack of 160 Foul Play will hit REALLY hard, because it's calculating using Slaking's 160 base Attack, rather than Zoroark's 105.
If you have Zoroark with Attack of 105 and used Foul Play on a Sunkern with a base Attack of 30, Foul Play will hit for next to nothing, since it's being calculated using Sunkern's pathetic base 30 Attack, rather than Zoroark's 105.
Make sense?
This move was particularly effective against my team:
Salamence - EV trained in attack
Scizor - EV trained in attack
Mamoswine - EV trained in attack
Crawdaunt - EV trained in attack
Gallade - EV trained in attack
...
Yea... Every time some one used Foul Play on me, it was a OHKO.
So, tip of the week! If you’re battling somebody who’s main stratagy is attack or brute force, Foul Play is definately a good choice to go with. Even putting it on somebody on your team who is particularly weak, doesn’t matter, the base power of the move (95) depends completely on your opponent’s power, not yours.
So who can learn this? Well, I would recommend a Pokemon who is particularly fast, especially in competitive battle that really starts to make a difference as to who can get off the line first, and in the case of Foul Play, usually it results in a OHKO if their Attack is high enough. Houndoom would be a good choice with a base 95 in Speed, Zoroark has a base Speed of 105, or Murkrow might not be a bad choice either with a base of 91.
Well, now you know, at least if your trying to beat me what move to use, lol. Thanks for reading, see you next week!
-It’s Super Effective
-aaronspriggs
