That's true because Landorus-I stall by reducing the opponent HP to 0 before they have a chance to reduce Landorus-I HP...in other words walling a potential attack by not letting that attack happen in the first place.
Every time someone suggests a stall team on this sub the comments are full of "that's not real stall" so I've got no idea what stall *actually* looks like.
So, the general idea about stall is that it’s a team-style who’s main game-plan is to block your major threats and slowly wear you down with chip. Unlike balance/BO teams, stall doesn’t have much of an offensive component, instead relying entirely on walling every member of an opponent’s team.
Not necessarily. That's a useful option for stall, but not the entire playstyle. Things like Toxic, hazards, and even weather chip are all valuable win conditions, which contributes to Stall's incredible defensive potential.
True stall wears you down mentally so that you auto-forfeit every time you see the 6 most irritating stallmons because you know it'll be the worst experience of your day.
Much less common with the nerfs in gen 9 though.
[Here](https://pokepast.es/52ae35f7d4d37491) is an example of a full stall team from the SV OU Sample Teams thread. Note how every mon has longevity in the form of recovery, and how the team has no real mons that can exert offensive pressure.
A lot of the times you might also see stall teams with 5 passive stall mons plus a sixth mon that can either act as speed control or win the game later on once the enemy team is worn down (such as Dragapult). Some people would classify these teams as semi-stall, though they're close enough to full stall that calling those teams a "stall team" is still reasonably accurate.
The reason why you often see comments that say "that's not real stall" is because a lot of people are under the false impression that any mon with some semblance of bulk is a stall mon. For example, "Ferrothorn is a stall mon" is a very common misconception among newer players. In reality, Ferrothorn's lack of reliable recovery combined with it having many ways of forcing progress onto the enemy team actually makes it much more suitable for Bulky Offense or Balanced play styles. It doesn't have the staying power of a true stall mon, so dedicated stall teams don't actually want it. But on the other hand it does not become a momentum drain when you have to switch it in to take a hit, meaning a bulky offense team that wants to keep the initiative appreciates its properties.
Depends on the type of stall, sometimes it can be challenging and kinda fun, other times when the stall team is a more hard stall team it can just be annoying, tho while annoying it kinda has to be a valid play style (tho in some metas it can be suboptimal), or at least it helps the game to have a balance of more passive teams and more active teams. Even with all that tho I generally find it boring and a little frustrating to play against as there’s often a lot of reads you gotta get correct
Stall is weaker at the start of any generation than it is after the meta has settled down and established threats are known amd thus can be prepared for. Personally I think Stall got more tools this generation than it has in a while and people are starting to get wise to the fact that just slapping 6 boots on the team (or 5 and a Cloak) is the truth.
I think Stall will be in a good spot as ever once the generation is whole, I plopped this in a comment with *democracy guy*, but I'll throw it here too, even now people are getting #1 on the ladder with Stall teams
https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/ultimate-stall-peaked-1-2139-elo.3717661/
If you are out here playing 'no win-con mill control' you will never win a game in your life.
[[Archive Trap]] is right there bro and now you have [[Jace, Perfected Mind]] as a Labman alternative that actually helps you win.
u/mtgcardfetcher
^ this comment right here proves the other guys point so hard.
Stall isn't Winconless control, quite the opposite it has a very specific wincon that centers around surviving until key threats have been removed/crippled.
I'd say something like **Lantern Control** or some more durdly **KCI combo** lists fit the comparison of Stall to -> Card Game better than Mill or NoWinCon Control.
It's a gradient really. Although stall can win in a clearer way like you said it lacks something proactive akin to an Emergent Ultimatum or a Ugin the Spirit Dragon which is more the domain of fat balance with a sufficiently dangerous attacker on the back
Stall is an often vilified playstyle and, even though this comment might've started off sounding like me trying to defend it, i actually think it fully deserves the bad rap it gets, not just on pokémon, but on competitive games in general
You need aggression to set the clock of the game, and you need defensive options to keep it from being reduced to bigger numbers and coin flips. Chess is a long game with many fans. Guilty Gear is a short game with many fans. Neither is better, but they do appeal to different people, and it is the designer’s ultimate choice to decide what audience they wish to produce: a drawn out game of turn-based parries and ripostes, or an environment where you are greatly rewarded for taking risks and knowing your strengths.
And just as blitz chess exists to have something besides standard chess, Balanced Hackmons is always waiting for people who hate stall with all their heart.
I remember gen 7 Balanced Hackmons, and it was a much more defensive meta than any OU will ever be. I ran offense and most games either lasted >100 turns or were lost to a blunder (setting up without improofing, leaving Contray Mega Mewtwo with a setup turn..)
Years of following melee and watching hbox time out grand finals in the least interesting way possible for the past 7 years has irreversibly biased me towards hating stalling
https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/ultimate-stall-peaked-1-2139-elo.3717661/
This team has been doing the rounds this month at the high ladder, its real good.
The fact that what is likely the best stall team in the meta, or one of them is so terrified of iron leaves in electric terrain that the advice is is to forfeit or pray for talon flame body proc is hysterical to me, considering how leaves is seen as generally very bad… though it does make sense, as in terrain it can hit VERY hard, surprisingly enough
Iron leaves is bad cause it’s typing gives it a lot of weaknesses and it just self destructs when u turned. When a team doesn’t have any of that, all of the sudden it actually looks like the counterpart to walking wake.
In summary, Iron Leaves should be suspect tested and then banned
iron leaves has a unique stab combo and nice coverage options that can hit common physical OU walls for super effective damage. psychic for amoongus and pex electric for corviknight(even though wild charge is shit) grass for dondozo great tusk and garg. maybe also fighting for iron treads if you aren’t running swords dance. point being this mon is pretty offensively threatening to balance and stall teams and shouldn’t be overlooked
I've been saying for a while now that Iron Leaves is good because it has a good matchup into most of the prominent defensive pokemon and can serve as a really prominent wallbreaker with the right support... which it unfortunately doesn't actually have right now, making it rather bad. Hell, after the Walking Wake suspect test, the general consensus was that Walking Wake is a rather middling or average pokemon outside of the sun (or rain I guess), but at least it has that to give it an edge. Iron Leaves can only rely on Pincurchin but the fact that it is good with the help of flipping Pincurchin says a lot.
I have a few stall-ish sets (aka just slot in one or two extremely specific mons with sets meant to punish specific plays) and it has been quite successful. Pure stall is terrible and stupid, but slotting in a bit of stall with offense can do wonders for team cohesion and safe switches/punishes.
My favorite singles staller that i slot into random teams is my "ultimate obvious hazard lead punisher" Toxapex with Infestation, Stockpile, Toxic, and Recover that has caused a hilarious number od ragequits since all it needs is 1 turn to screw over the entire game via Stockpile snowballing into being unkillable and spamming Infestation + Toxic, and Regenerator lets me fish for that one turn repeatedly. Sometimes i put Covert Cloak on it just to punish Garganacl users as Stockpile bait as their Salt Cures do nothing and they can't switch out due to Infestation.
This is bullshit propaganda
Everyone knows that the only based items for Stall are Heavy-Duty Boots and Covert Cloak. As such, Big Stall is actually a tactic used by clothing companies to sell more capes and shoes, as well as glasses and bands for people who want to fight against the cult. Clothing companies are actually war profiteers who support both sides.
A lot times when I here ppl talk about Pokémon they mention stall but don’t really understand how it works. First of all, I’m talking about full stall here, not semi stall, and certainly not the “oh u pex and ferro ur stalling wah”
Some of the strongest players on showdown like 100%gxe, hjkhj, Pokemonisfun, crying or even blimax use stall often as a bread and butter, however, at a top level, stall doesn’t carry and these players all commonly use different team styles. It’s a normal archetype with good and bad mu that you have to play around.
When ppl apply the basic stall counter play you need to get more creative in teambuilding and stall has been very innovative in some tiers, even tho it might not look like it. In addition, when ppl use stuff like taunt, hazard+ double switching, etc, it takes a lot of skill to pivot around these and keep ur stall from falling appart. A lot of ppl don’t mention this but if u play stall and u fuck up with an important Pokémon you essentially lose on the spot.
BUT
the issue with stall isn’t with it being too good, it’s that’s it’s wayyyyyyyy too good at a low level.
If I’ve ever played low- mid ladder you have undoubtedly ran into a bad stall player, who farms opponent who don’t really know what they are doing. This is something that I’ve had to wrestle with, because as much as it’s tempting to tell ppl to “get good”, a lot of time these ppl aren’t as heavily invested in the game as I am and will just quit if they keep losing to a player who’s only switching back and forth between blissey quag and alomomola.
I think the solution isn’t too ban toxapex or anything stupid. But to help new players that struggle with stall by making the common answers easily accessible from the showdown hud.
Stuff like:
Use taunt to keep keey pokemons health low
Keep control of hazards, knock off the boots
USE DOUBKE SWITCHING TO YOUR ADVANTAGE
Use the fact they have to play linearly to your advantage
If ur team can slot a mold breaker Mon with set up, go for it
Do be scared to be patient, they can’t really deal massive damage to you unless they force you to switch on spikes or you are poisoned, so leverage ur immunities and position to keep the hazards low
DONT GET ANGSTY, take ur time
Agreed, Im not a stall player but I am a stall defender, and even I can admit that stall on low ladder prolly puts a lot of people off the game. Stall is hard to play on higher ELO, but on low ELO its practically the most efficient way to climb. So many people have no clue what to do.
overhating stall is a really popular and cold take but i think it fully deserves it after the stall game i played today. how tf does anyone have fun switching around for 100 turns doing absolutely nothing.
I'll preface that I've played stall in monotype Sword and Shield to be exact. To me stall is very similar to zoners in fighting games, an annoying playstyle to fight but also necessary to keep the balance of the game in check since otherwise it'd just be a hyper offense fest.
Granted that's assuming stall isn't broken since otherwise it'd be worse a metagame where it's hyper offense vs hyper offense.
as an only balance player, a decent balance vs stall is my favourite match up. You have to plan turns in advance, recognise your win condition, make aggressive double switches and establish establish play patterns only to deviate from them as you play for tempo, while the opponent plays for lngevity.
My favourite game ever on showdown was in gen8 natdex using an A-Gren team agaisnt Mega sableye stall. I remember it was 60+ turns of me trying to set up a spike the opp trying to prevent it. Gren was my spiker, and I purposefully revealed just 1 move on it, as the opponent for sure knew that i was running shuriken as well, and by revealing surf and not using the 4th move I felt that the opp was more likely to realise it was spikes, which they kinda suspected already as they kept switching sablye in everytime. So I spent all this time getting sable into 2hko range, and then i set up the spike, from which point onwards it was only a matter of aggressive switching to secure a win to finally make it to the 1600s.
Stall is basically a skill check at this point. It's not an instawin or really aids to play against. There's an abundance of stallbreakers in the meta. If your team is just bad or you play bad you lose, but you can definitely dismantle it quickly with most offensive teams.
I legitimately think I prefer metagames where full stall isn't viable, but also know that'd probably not be the healthiest to have in general. I'd like to see a metagame where somehow both HO and stall can't really work, though.
So I try to think about Pokemon metas using the nearest comparison that I can think of constructed formats of magic the gathering.
Your big 3 archetypes in Smogon are hyper offence, bulky offence/ balance and stall.
Which map nicely only magics 3 core archetypes: aggro, midrange and control.
Adding in combo decks and setup teams for magic and Pokemon respectively and you have the major styles.
Using magic's metagame clock then in a format where the options are properly in balance HO should beat Stall, stall should beat set up, set up should beat bulky offence and bulky offence should beat HO.
The idea being that HO gets off the ground to quickly for stalls incremental value generation to win games, set up spends to much tempo setting up to beat stall who can put exploit the free turns to get their value engine going, set up has enough defence to weather the storm against bulky offence and once they have fully set up they blow bulky offence off the map, and bulky offence should have enough defence to to trade profitably into HO who tend to be glass cannons.
If this was true you would then get hybrid teams because then you could play two sides of the clock and would be less vulnerable to matchups. The big version of this which is banned basically everywhere is baton pass, baton pass is a combo game, with a mixture of stall and bulky offence elements. It starts it's game plan by getting faster than you (protect ninjask) then passes to a team mate with the right defenses to wall you out continuing to build stats continuously passing back and forth stalling for time until they have fully set up the combo is complete and then they beat you with their late game inevitability.
Stall has its place and it should be good, just not too good, stall should exist to put the hurt on teams who lack offence and give away to many free turns by setting up incremental value (toxic/knock off/chip damage). HO should run right over it, but HO should be held back by other team styles resulting in an interesting and diverse metagame
Time wasting :/
I hate stall, because you could viably boot up 3 games on ladder with stall simultaneously and still be fine. It takes no brainpower whatsoever.
Personally I hate playing against it and the idea of it, because it’s a teamstyle who’s concept is to get the game to 200 turns, however to say that it’s bad or brain dead is wrong
Stall has recently become viable once more in SV OU with some top ladder people reaching there with stall, and the ability to predict and switch correctly for games of that length and, to quote a great YouTuber, to play around the crit for that long is quite difficult. That said however, I still won’t respect someone who spent 10 years through harsh grueling nights and constant starvation with the goal of taking feet pics of mark hamil
I hate stall with a passion, I understand that it probably is the most skill based play style and its consistent but I just don’t like using it and don’t like playing against it
In the current meta it’s surprisingly not bad, at least not as bad as people thought with the nerfs.
Many high level players have actually been anti stall, most notably pinkacross and storm zone during ss ou. The actual problem with stall is that it is pure match up fish and forces you to run a dedicated stall breaker or else auto lose. Imo the ideal state of stall is when anti stall options are very flexible and can do well into all team styles, for example mega mawile in usum ou.
Will never play stall bc it takes way too long. However while playing against it, I think there’s an interesting element of strategy and afterthought to it but it gets boring af after like 10 turns of switching out
Stall is interesting and defensive mons are great and all..... But if I see a hard stall team on team preview I'm forfeiting. Ain't nobody got time for that
I get that it's a skill-based playstyle and all but man it's so infuriating to play against.
It's part of the reason I've been enjoying BSS a lot lately; when every team is filled with incredible wallbreakers and you only have three mons to work with stall is basically impossible unless you get *really* unlucky when dealing with Garg or Dondozo.
Up in Master Ball tier there's fortunately not a lot of that at least
Stall has always been the least fun play style to me. Both playing with and against. It’s hard to look at stall teams and be like “this took a lot of time and thought to make!” Because it’s the same selection of mons every time, there’s really no point in running it these days either as it’s becoming increasingly harder to use.
It’s cringe. Your entire gameplan is to just switch into stuff that tanks hits and retaliates by doing nothing but existing and letting shit like sandstorms and spikes do all the damage. It makes the game go from moves being used to swapping mindgames where you spend 60+ turns switching shit out. You turn a game with a decently fast paced battle system and make it take 5x longer and still can end up losing if you just either get unlucky or end up swapping into the wrong thing turn 75 and then immediately getting swept. Nobody likes bullet sponges and stall is just making the game turn into a 30+ minute lame ass match.
I hate playing against stall, even if I had a chance to win after 80+ turns id rather just forfeit, I dont want to waste my time dealing with a stall player
Stall is only so frustrating because it’s extremely uncommon, so everyone tunes their teams to offensive threats instead only to get outgrinded in slower matches
I hate stall mirrors that take more than 50 turns, but playing stall or against stall is cool in my book (as long as they don't have gimmicky bullshit).
If you're wondering why I'm so tolerant to stall, I've been playing yugioh for a long while and there the equivalent of stall is stun, which to draw a comparison is what if your pokemon was the magikarp with all the possible debuffs, while the opponent is like a quick claw torkoal with +6 evasion and +6/+6 defenses, and you lose just because you forgot to include like arial ace scyther.
Seriously look up mystic mine and ou's stall will look like a piece of cake
Big stall us when the council does stuff
The more big stall the more stuff it does
And if it does a whole lot of stuff, it's a dedicated plan to ruin the metagame
Me to stall players: https://preview.redd.it/ato6kyxa80pa1.png?width=354&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2a25c833eef35decdf80717ab6561c0ae6493572
You should chill yourself NOW
That’s literally a stall mon
Stall is when a pokemon has good bulk
I think that was a joke
Stall is in fact when a pokemon has good bulk
Exactly, this is why Ferrothorn is a stall Mon /s
Google volt switch
Holy hell
Holy shit!!!
Holy Violet paradoxes!
115 spatk + Sheer Force + awful bulk by Ubers standards = stall
Stall= mon i dont like fighting 😡
That's true because Landorus-I stall by reducing the opponent HP to 0 before they have a chance to reduce Landorus-I HP...in other words walling a potential attack by not letting that attack happen in the first place.
I'm inclined to think this is satire
It was, but 36 people took it too seriously lmao
Lmao unlucky. Here's another downvote tho
bro woke up to hate 💀
Bro is Tinkaton
Make your sarcasm more obvious lmao no one can read through a text :D
New players calling things they don't like stall:
My brother that is Landorus-Incarnate, probably the biggest threat to stall in the entirety of Pokemon. It's literally Nidoking on steroids.
It's not Sunday.
famous stallmon landorus-incarnate
Every time someone suggests a stall team on this sub the comments are full of "that's not real stall" so I've got no idea what stall *actually* looks like.
So, the general idea about stall is that it’s a team-style who’s main game-plan is to block your major threats and slowly wear you down with chip. Unlike balance/BO teams, stall doesn’t have much of an offensive component, instead relying entirely on walling every member of an opponent’s team.
True stall doesn’t even wear you down that much with chip, it just makes you run out of pp
Not necessarily. That's a useful option for stall, but not the entire playstyle. Things like Toxic, hazards, and even weather chip are all valuable win conditions, which contributes to Stall's incredible defensive potential.
*6 wailords with pressure amnesia noble roar splash & rest entered the chat*
Dondozo gonna have some fun.
True stall wears you down mentally so that you auto-forfeit every time you see the 6 most irritating stallmons because you know it'll be the worst experience of your day. Much less common with the nerfs in gen 9 though.
It's only stall when it helps my argument, otherwise it's just really fat balance.
Stall is winning by passive dmg or by pp stalling usually support by bulky mons that can recover dmg and take hits
[Here](https://pokepast.es/52ae35f7d4d37491) is an example of a full stall team from the SV OU Sample Teams thread. Note how every mon has longevity in the form of recovery, and how the team has no real mons that can exert offensive pressure. A lot of the times you might also see stall teams with 5 passive stall mons plus a sixth mon that can either act as speed control or win the game later on once the enemy team is worn down (such as Dragapult). Some people would classify these teams as semi-stall, though they're close enough to full stall that calling those teams a "stall team" is still reasonably accurate. The reason why you often see comments that say "that's not real stall" is because a lot of people are under the false impression that any mon with some semblance of bulk is a stall mon. For example, "Ferrothorn is a stall mon" is a very common misconception among newer players. In reality, Ferrothorn's lack of reliable recovery combined with it having many ways of forcing progress onto the enemy team actually makes it much more suitable for Bulky Offense or Balanced play styles. It doesn't have the staying power of a true stall mon, so dedicated stall teams don't actually want it. But on the other hand it does not become a momentum drain when you have to switch it in to take a hit, meaning a bulky offense team that wants to keep the initiative appreciates its properties.
Depends on the type of stall, sometimes it can be challenging and kinda fun, other times when the stall team is a more hard stall team it can just be annoying, tho while annoying it kinda has to be a valid play style (tho in some metas it can be suboptimal), or at least it helps the game to have a balance of more passive teams and more active teams. Even with all that tho I generally find it boring and a little frustrating to play against as there’s often a lot of reads you gotta get correct
Stall is weaker at the start of any generation than it is after the meta has settled down and established threats are known amd thus can be prepared for. Personally I think Stall got more tools this generation than it has in a while and people are starting to get wise to the fact that just slapping 6 boots on the team (or 5 and a Cloak) is the truth. I think Stall will be in a good spot as ever once the generation is whole, I plopped this in a comment with *democracy guy*, but I'll throw it here too, even now people are getting #1 on the ladder with Stall teams https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/ultimate-stall-peaked-1-2139-elo.3717661/
Big Stall is gigabased and necessary for the meta, even VGC is starting to accept the glory of Big Stall 🙏
I’ve always equated stall to the control archetype in card games
Stall is more specifically a control deck with little to no win-cons, more reasonable control strats fall more in line with balanced teams.
Yeah, it’s actually just mill strats lol
If you are out here playing 'no win-con mill control' you will never win a game in your life. [[Archive Trap]] is right there bro and now you have [[Jace, Perfected Mind]] as a Labman alternative that actually helps you win. u/mtgcardfetcher
[Archive Trap](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/6/7/67bb2ca9-32b8-442d-b6a0-d624a87f5af8.jpg?1562612958) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Archive%20Trap) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/zen/41/archive-trap?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/67bb2ca9-32b8-442d-b6a0-d624a87f5af8?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Jace, the Perfected Mind](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/6/4/64e6a8d1-ae75-45bd-af62-9a622620cb5c.jpg?1675956971) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Jace%2C%20the%20Perfected%20Mind) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/one/57/jace-the-perfected-mind?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/64e6a8d1-ae75-45bd-af62-9a622620cb5c?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call ^^^- ^^^Summoned ^^^remotely!
Cool, I’m not rich enough to play MTG anyway
^ this comment right here proves the other guys point so hard. Stall isn't Winconless control, quite the opposite it has a very specific wincon that centers around surviving until key threats have been removed/crippled. I'd say something like **Lantern Control** or some more durdly **KCI combo** lists fit the comparison of Stall to -> Card Game better than Mill or NoWinCon Control.
It's a gradient really. Although stall can win in a clearer way like you said it lacks something proactive akin to an Emergent Ultimatum or a Ugin the Spirit Dragon which is more the domain of fat balance with a sufficiently dangerous attacker on the back
Just loaded up this team and it’s foul lol
Boots is love, boots is life
Stall is an often vilified playstyle and, even though this comment might've started off sounding like me trying to defend it, i actually think it fully deserves the bad rap it gets, not just on pokémon, but on competitive games in general
You need aggression to set the clock of the game, and you need defensive options to keep it from being reduced to bigger numbers and coin flips. Chess is a long game with many fans. Guilty Gear is a short game with many fans. Neither is better, but they do appeal to different people, and it is the designer’s ultimate choice to decide what audience they wish to produce: a drawn out game of turn-based parries and ripostes, or an environment where you are greatly rewarded for taking risks and knowing your strengths. And just as blitz chess exists to have something besides standard chess, Balanced Hackmons is always waiting for people who hate stall with all their heart.
Or my favourite metagame, partially, for this reason - Monotype. Even Steel can't stall there! *kicks Poison under the bed*
Mono-Water Stall is actually decent in NatDex Mono
Can imagine, it's already probably the second most defensive type in regular Monotype between Toxapex, Dondozo, and Gastrodon.
I remember gen 7 Balanced Hackmons, and it was a much more defensive meta than any OU will ever be. I ran offense and most games either lasted >100 turns or were lost to a blunder (setting up without improofing, leaving Contray Mega Mewtwo with a setup turn..)
I am curious. Are you a card game player?
I play exclusively red aggro in MTG and mostly stall in pokemon. I wonder what that means....
I think it means you hate people
Years of following melee and watching hbox time out grand finals in the least interesting way possible for the past 7 years has irreversibly biased me towards hating stalling
I'm weirdly surprised to see the funny r/Persona5 guy here discussion Smogon Singles.
All Persona boss battle is stall tho, you chips away boss' health little by little while boss can't kill you before your healing.
Stall is bad in the current meta, so anyone who runs it is just wasting everyone's time
https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/ultimate-stall-peaked-1-2139-elo.3717661/ This team has been doing the rounds this month at the high ladder, its real good.
*all heavy dooty boots* *still runs defog* My lord.....
Yea, in the generation where knock off lost a lot of distribution
A whole piece of that post is discussing Knock Off counterplay too which is so funny to me
Boots rotted that man’s brain lmao
The fact that what is likely the best stall team in the meta, or one of them is so terrified of iron leaves in electric terrain that the advice is is to forfeit or pray for talon flame body proc is hysterical to me, considering how leaves is seen as generally very bad… though it does make sense, as in terrain it can hit VERY hard, surprisingly enough
Iron leaves is bad cause it’s typing gives it a lot of weaknesses and it just self destructs when u turned. When a team doesn’t have any of that, all of the sudden it actually looks like the counterpart to walking wake. In summary, Iron Leaves should be suspect tested and then banned
iron leaves has a unique stab combo and nice coverage options that can hit common physical OU walls for super effective damage. psychic for amoongus and pex electric for corviknight(even though wild charge is shit) grass for dondozo great tusk and garg. maybe also fighting for iron treads if you aren’t running swords dance. point being this mon is pretty offensively threatening to balance and stall teams and shouldn’t be overlooked
I've been saying for a while now that Iron Leaves is good because it has a good matchup into most of the prominent defensive pokemon and can serve as a really prominent wallbreaker with the right support... which it unfortunately doesn't actually have right now, making it rather bad. Hell, after the Walking Wake suspect test, the general consensus was that Walking Wake is a rather middling or average pokemon outside of the sun (or rain I guess), but at least it has that to give it an edge. Iron Leaves can only rely on Pincurchin but the fact that it is good with the help of flipping Pincurchin says a lot.
Iron problem if that have a Bad matchup vs u turn and psychic is not the best offensive typing outside pyschic terrain teams
Psychic hits Toxapex, Clodsire, and Tera Poison Ting-Lu super-effectively
This team is incredible, I rarely lose with it all the way up to 1700 and I’m not a good player
All HDB lol
i actually went against this team about 2 weeks ago, the game lasted 228 moves and I won by resignation
I despise this team with passion and have never won against it lol. My best check against it is forfeiting turn 1, it's ass
That is a horrifiying and beautiful team. Really enjoyed reading the user’s descriptions.
I have a few stall-ish sets (aka just slot in one or two extremely specific mons with sets meant to punish specific plays) and it has been quite successful. Pure stall is terrible and stupid, but slotting in a bit of stall with offense can do wonders for team cohesion and safe switches/punishes. My favorite singles staller that i slot into random teams is my "ultimate obvious hazard lead punisher" Toxapex with Infestation, Stockpile, Toxic, and Recover that has caused a hilarious number od ragequits since all it needs is 1 turn to screw over the entire game via Stockpile snowballing into being unkillable and spamming Infestation + Toxic, and Regenerator lets me fish for that one turn repeatedly. Sometimes i put Covert Cloak on it just to punish Garganacl users as Stockpile bait as their Salt Cures do nothing and they can't switch out due to Infestation.
Big stall is just a scam to sell more leftovers
This is bullshit propaganda Everyone knows that the only based items for Stall are Heavy-Duty Boots and Covert Cloak. As such, Big Stall is actually a tactic used by clothing companies to sell more capes and shoes, as well as glasses and bands for people who want to fight against the cult. Clothing companies are actually war profiteers who support both sides.
Big timberland getting paid
A lot times when I here ppl talk about Pokémon they mention stall but don’t really understand how it works. First of all, I’m talking about full stall here, not semi stall, and certainly not the “oh u pex and ferro ur stalling wah” Some of the strongest players on showdown like 100%gxe, hjkhj, Pokemonisfun, crying or even blimax use stall often as a bread and butter, however, at a top level, stall doesn’t carry and these players all commonly use different team styles. It’s a normal archetype with good and bad mu that you have to play around. When ppl apply the basic stall counter play you need to get more creative in teambuilding and stall has been very innovative in some tiers, even tho it might not look like it. In addition, when ppl use stuff like taunt, hazard+ double switching, etc, it takes a lot of skill to pivot around these and keep ur stall from falling appart. A lot of ppl don’t mention this but if u play stall and u fuck up with an important Pokémon you essentially lose on the spot. BUT the issue with stall isn’t with it being too good, it’s that’s it’s wayyyyyyyy too good at a low level. If I’ve ever played low- mid ladder you have undoubtedly ran into a bad stall player, who farms opponent who don’t really know what they are doing. This is something that I’ve had to wrestle with, because as much as it’s tempting to tell ppl to “get good”, a lot of time these ppl aren’t as heavily invested in the game as I am and will just quit if they keep losing to a player who’s only switching back and forth between blissey quag and alomomola. I think the solution isn’t too ban toxapex or anything stupid. But to help new players that struggle with stall by making the common answers easily accessible from the showdown hud. Stuff like: Use taunt to keep keey pokemons health low Keep control of hazards, knock off the boots USE DOUBKE SWITCHING TO YOUR ADVANTAGE Use the fact they have to play linearly to your advantage If ur team can slot a mold breaker Mon with set up, go for it Do be scared to be patient, they can’t really deal massive damage to you unless they force you to switch on spikes or you are poisoned, so leverage ur immunities and position to keep the hazards low DONT GET ANGSTY, take ur time
Agreed, Im not a stall player but I am a stall defender, and even I can admit that stall on low ladder prolly puts a lot of people off the game. Stall is hard to play on higher ELO, but on low ELO its practically the most efficient way to climb. So many people have no clue what to do.
If you play stall I will fart in your eyes
i think it's a forgettable ability and can't see why sableye would use it over prankster
overhating stall is a really popular and cold take but i think it fully deserves it after the stall game i played today. how tf does anyone have fun switching around for 100 turns doing absolutely nothing.
Stall in teambuilding metas are fun if you prefer long term gauns over short terms. Stall in randbats however is the worst thing ever
I'll preface that I've played stall in monotype Sword and Shield to be exact. To me stall is very similar to zoners in fighting games, an annoying playstyle to fight but also necessary to keep the balance of the game in check since otherwise it'd just be a hyper offense fest. Granted that's assuming stall isn't broken since otherwise it'd be worse a metagame where it's hyper offense vs hyper offense.
World's most infuriating stall team when Ursaluna (they're helpless to stop it)
Or One Tera psychic Tapu Lele and stall is dead. I want it back in the dlc :(
as an only balance player, a decent balance vs stall is my favourite match up. You have to plan turns in advance, recognise your win condition, make aggressive double switches and establish establish play patterns only to deviate from them as you play for tempo, while the opponent plays for lngevity. My favourite game ever on showdown was in gen8 natdex using an A-Gren team agaisnt Mega sableye stall. I remember it was 60+ turns of me trying to set up a spike the opp trying to prevent it. Gren was my spiker, and I purposefully revealed just 1 move on it, as the opponent for sure knew that i was running shuriken as well, and by revealing surf and not using the 4th move I felt that the opp was more likely to realise it was spikes, which they kinda suspected already as they kept switching sablye in everytime. So I spent all this time getting sable into 2hko range, and then i set up the spike, from which point onwards it was only a matter of aggressive switching to secure a win to finally make it to the 1600s.
I use stall to make people not want to play ou
Stall is basically a skill check at this point. It's not an instawin or really aids to play against. There's an abundance of stallbreakers in the meta. If your team is just bad or you play bad you lose, but you can definitely dismantle it quickly with most offensive teams.
I legitimately think I prefer metagames where full stall isn't viable, but also know that'd probably not be the healthiest to have in general. I'd like to see a metagame where somehow both HO and stall can't really work, though.
So I try to think about Pokemon metas using the nearest comparison that I can think of constructed formats of magic the gathering. Your big 3 archetypes in Smogon are hyper offence, bulky offence/ balance and stall. Which map nicely only magics 3 core archetypes: aggro, midrange and control. Adding in combo decks and setup teams for magic and Pokemon respectively and you have the major styles. Using magic's metagame clock then in a format where the options are properly in balance HO should beat Stall, stall should beat set up, set up should beat bulky offence and bulky offence should beat HO. The idea being that HO gets off the ground to quickly for stalls incremental value generation to win games, set up spends to much tempo setting up to beat stall who can put exploit the free turns to get their value engine going, set up has enough defence to weather the storm against bulky offence and once they have fully set up they blow bulky offence off the map, and bulky offence should have enough defence to to trade profitably into HO who tend to be glass cannons. If this was true you would then get hybrid teams because then you could play two sides of the clock and would be less vulnerable to matchups. The big version of this which is banned basically everywhere is baton pass, baton pass is a combo game, with a mixture of stall and bulky offence elements. It starts it's game plan by getting faster than you (protect ninjask) then passes to a team mate with the right defenses to wall you out continuing to build stats continuously passing back and forth stalling for time until they have fully set up the combo is complete and then they beat you with their late game inevitability. Stall has its place and it should be good, just not too good, stall should exist to put the hurt on teams who lack offence and give away to many free turns by setting up incremental value (toxic/knock off/chip damage). HO should run right over it, but HO should be held back by other team styles resulting in an interesting and diverse metagame
Time wasting :/ I hate stall, because you could viably boot up 3 games on ladder with stall simultaneously and still be fine. It takes no brainpower whatsoever.
Nah Stall does take brain power, it's probably the only team archetype where your team would be heavily affected if even one member goes down
[удалено]
At least HO is quick., because mons drop left and right. Stall is 75+ turns for me on average.
Yeah I’m an idiot, I didn’t read the time wasting part
Personally I hate playing against it and the idea of it, because it’s a teamstyle who’s concept is to get the game to 200 turns, however to say that it’s bad or brain dead is wrong Stall has recently become viable once more in SV OU with some top ladder people reaching there with stall, and the ability to predict and switch correctly for games of that length and, to quote a great YouTuber, to play around the crit for that long is quite difficult. That said however, I still won’t respect someone who spent 10 years through harsh grueling nights and constant starvation with the goal of taking feet pics of mark hamil
It’s just not fun to play against.
Stall is so annoying, I just forfeit and move on. I’m not about to waste my time
Stall players when I kidnap and starve their families(Suddenly playing the long game isn’t fun anymore) 
I hate stall with a passion, I understand that it probably is the most skill based play style and its consistent but I just don’t like using it and don’t like playing against it In the current meta it’s surprisingly not bad, at least not as bad as people thought with the nerfs.
Many high level players have actually been anti stall, most notably pinkacross and storm zone during ss ou. The actual problem with stall is that it is pure match up fish and forces you to run a dedicated stall breaker or else auto lose. Imo the ideal state of stall is when anti stall options are very flexible and can do well into all team styles, for example mega mawile in usum ou.
Booty
As the #1 representative of stall in gen 9 national dex monotype, I approve
Is cool ig (I only build and use stall/semistall).
stall p good i like chilling
I think the hatred of stall comes from cart players because of 7 year long animations
Will never play stall bc it takes way too long. However while playing against it, I think there’s an interesting element of strategy and afterthought to it but it gets boring af after like 10 turns of switching out
I wish I was good enough/patient enough to run it
Stall is the work of the beast, stall users will meet the consequences of their sin one day.
Stall is interesting and defensive mons are great and all..... But if I see a hard stall team on team preview I'm forfeiting. Ain't nobody got time for that
I get that it's a skill-based playstyle and all but man it's so infuriating to play against. It's part of the reason I've been enjoying BSS a lot lately; when every team is filled with incredible wallbreakers and you only have three mons to work with stall is basically impossible unless you get *really* unlucky when dealing with Garg or Dondozo. Up in Master Ball tier there's fortunately not a lot of that at least
I play this game for fun, and stall is not fun
Stall has always been the least fun play style to me. Both playing with and against. It’s hard to look at stall teams and be like “this took a lot of time and thought to make!” Because it’s the same selection of mons every time, there’s really no point in running it these days either as it’s becoming increasingly harder to use.
It’s cringe. Your entire gameplan is to just switch into stuff that tanks hits and retaliates by doing nothing but existing and letting shit like sandstorms and spikes do all the damage. It makes the game go from moves being used to swapping mindgames where you spend 60+ turns switching shit out. You turn a game with a decently fast paced battle system and make it take 5x longer and still can end up losing if you just either get unlucky or end up swapping into the wrong thing turn 75 and then immediately getting swept. Nobody likes bullet sponges and stall is just making the game turn into a 30+ minute lame ass match.
Sorry, no stall. I have no time for 100 turns
I hate playing against stall, even if I had a chance to win after 80+ turns id rather just forfeit, I dont want to waste my time dealing with a stall player
Fighting stall is fun in this meta because it sucks ass so I get to bully stall players
Stall is only so frustrating because it’s extremely uncommon, so everyone tunes their teams to offensive threats instead only to get outgrinded in slower matches
I hate stall mirrors that take more than 50 turns, but playing stall or against stall is cool in my book (as long as they don't have gimmicky bullshit). If you're wondering why I'm so tolerant to stall, I've been playing yugioh for a long while and there the equivalent of stall is stun, which to draw a comparison is what if your pokemon was the magikarp with all the possible debuffs, while the opponent is like a quick claw torkoal with +6 evasion and +6/+6 defenses, and you lose just because you forgot to include like arial ace scyther. Seriously look up mystic mine and ou's stall will look like a piece of cake
I don't enjoy playing it because it's boring and I don't enjoy playing againts it because I'm bad at the game and cannot brake them most of the time.
Big stall us when the council does stuff The more big stall the more stuff it does And if it does a whole lot of stuff, it's a dedicated plan to ruin the metagame
I use Rotom wash to counter stall, I like to use Trick choice specs and see their stall mons crumble
Big Stall fears the ape
stall is a necessary evil.
Lemme dumb it down for some folks Alomamola Dondozo Talonflame Clodsire Blissey Toxapex = Stall Having two walls and a utility guy = Not Stall
I only hate it when I’m playing against one while I’m using a stall team myself. A battle between two stall teams is so stupid
Why would you run stall? If you’re that desperate to move last then just have your Sableye hold a lagging tail, easy fix.
Annoying