I've played pokemon games since the original red version on the fat Game Boy. Never really got into battling online even when it was debuted in Diamond/Pearl but always kind of thought about what the best team would look like. Then I was reading around these boards and found out about a place called Smogon which would talk about ideal movesets for certain pokemon.

After reading a few pages on their forums....Wow...just wow. These guys absolutely study pokemon and have tried to turn it into a science. They actually make objective calculations based on certain pokemon's max stats given the nature/EV spread and base power of moves. They know not only who can counter who, but which sets can do it!

I wouldn't be surprised if half the people there never even played these games but used cold calculations alone to determine who would beat who in certain situations. And with like 400 full evolved pokemon these days, how the hell do they even have time to get all the details down?

Overall, they make the games way too convoluted. Now they want to "ban" non-legendary pokemon because they might be too powerful. I wouldn't want to face a team of 6 Lugias, but that's why we have total base stat thresholds to determine who's uber and who's not.

Whatever....I think the site's pretty good at getting a feel at which pokemon does best at what, but when you try to actually read the analyses, it's hard to wonder how long it took people come with such detailed explanations that make the game seem very compicated.

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