Oh boy, am I excited to talk about Medicham, aka Silph League king. It was one of the kings of the meta in early days of Pokémon Go PvP. Way before the official Go Battle League was made, the most popular forms of competitive trainer VS trainer battles was the Silph League. A community ran competitive league that has rule-sets that changed every month to encourage Pokémon diversity in the PvP scene, and was done in Great League so people wouldn't have to spend all their stardust building new teams each month. Medicham was so good it was often ban from these monthly leagues to keep the meta from turning into just Medicham counters.
Medicham was a perfect storm of a stats that allowed it's CP to max out just under the 1500 Great League limit, a typing that not only had good coverage, but allowed it to sneak into a lot of Silph Leagues, and move pool to really let it shine, at least until Power-up Punch got nerfed. Though it's still pretty good even after that nerf. Not quite cream of the crop of the Go Battle League Great League meta, but able to hold it's own against of few Pokémon in that meta. Doing well against the likes of Umbreon, Bastodon and king of the meta Registeel.
It's secret to it's success is ironically enough, it's CP. CP is short for combat power, and is a formula that combines a Pokémon's stats together to come up with a numeric value for how powerful the Pokémon is. The catch is that CP heavily favors attack, so Pokémon defensive Pokemon like Blissey would have significantly lower CP to offensive powerhouses like Rayquaza and Slaking. Between this and other factors that would be too complicated to explain here, just because two Pokémon have similar CP doesn't mean they have similar levels of power. Sorry for the tangent, but this is super important for later.
Abilities don't exist in Pokémon Go. So that super attack stat it has in the main series games? Non-existent. Making it's CP terrible since all it's stats were terrible, as a result useless for raiding, Ultra League, and Master League. However, that terrible CP made it perfect for Great League. A perfect IV Medicham that is raised to the highest level possible in Pokémon Go still only has a 1431 CP, when anything under 1500 can enter Great League. Even if you make that Pokémon your best buddy to temporarily raise it an extra level it would still be under 1500. So remember that CP talk from before? This is where that knowledge is needed to understand how such a terrible Pokémon can do so well in this league. Explained as basically as possible this low CP allows it to get the most out of each of it's level up. No having to take away attack IVs to avoid being unable to level it up one more time and fit under the limit. So other Pokémon that even had the same CP still wouldn't have as good of stats as Medichan just because they had to sacrifice either base stats or IVs to still fit under 1500. Azumarill, a king in the Great League meta, along with Bastodon also do as well as they do for very similar reasons to Medichan.
And those 4 paragraphs were just talking about how it's terrible stats were ironically amazing. I haven't even gotten into the move pool for this Pokémon. As I eluded to before. Power-up Punch was amazing in the early days of Pokémon Go. To the point where you could do massive damage to competitors just from using that move whenever you got enough energy to use it from stacking up attack boost after attack boost. While it did get nerf, this wasn't to discourage the use of Power-up Punch, as much as it was to encourage using other moves in combination with Power-up Punch, thanks to those boosts. Though these days Medichan tends to prefer running Dyamic Punch as their fighting type move and ice punch for coverage against popular Pokémon in Great League such as Swampert and Skarmory. Though I do occasionally still see people run Power-up punch for baiting shields. Regardless of the charge move, Counter is the prefer quick move for Medichan with a nice blend between power and gaining energy for these amazing charge moves. Most interestingly though is it's quick move Psycho Cut, which does next to no damage on it's own but has the second best energy gain in the game. However, since Counter does a good enough job gaining energy as is, it's considered not worth the risk of not being able to finish off a weaken foe because of how weak your charge move is. (More of how that sort of quick move can be incredibly valuable if any of the Regi get revisited in one of these videos.)
So yeah, even though Medicham isn't as well define in the Great League meta as Pokémon like Registeel and Azumarill, and is completely worthless in anything else. Medicham is still great in the Great League meta if that freaking novel I've wrote in the YouTube comments isn't a good enough indication. Depending on how they handle mega evolutions or abilities in Pokémon Go, it might actually end up being worst when/if those features are added to the game due to just how perfectly it's stats line up for Great League. Time will tell for sure though.
Comments