>>14399609>you're fucking lying anyways lelYou're allowed to think so, but it's true. You used to be able to find my Shedinja team on Smogon forums because people copied it down, don't know if it's still there. My UU team never got popular, but it worked very, very well and got me very close to the top.
I'll spell this out for you again, more simply.
Matchmaking will test the "worst high-level" players against the "best low-level" players. Everyone who plays the game at the top has already fought against your cookie-cutter mons a hundred times and probably has read Smogon, so knows pretty much exactly what to expect out of you, how many attacks it'll take to get the KO against it, etc. Pokemon is a game of prediction, so if they know your set, they know exactly what member of their team they can use to counter it, or at least how they can work momentum back into their favor. If you use entirely conventional sets, you give good players complete information on how you're fighting without having any information on how they're fighting, and they will have a tendency to win as a result. Unconventional sets work against their assumptions, and let you respond to their supposed counters by changing which threats your mons can respond to. Against low-level copy-paste players, unconventional sets work well enough to keep them above the "best low-level" players, while letting them compete at all with the other high-level players in a fight for the top. Without an original set, they'll always be mediocre. The best of the bad.
It's not playing sub-optimally, since you still have to rely on synergies and having good coverage. It's just playing in a way that people who've read the manual can't immediately predict and counter. The common-ness of Smogon sets is what makes THOSE sets sub-optimal and creativity necessary.
