Introduction

The month of May is possibly my favorite time of the year, which is an opinion many other people I know also hold. The weather reaches a perfect balance between the damp and depressing rain of April and the scorching heat of the summer months, and at night, the sky looks almost like a painting. What sets May apart even further, especially among college students, is the omnipresent anticipation of finals coming to a close. It’s almost surreal to think that all the unnecessary stress over exams and project deadlines I’ve experienced throughout the semester will be over in just four days. Maybe I’ll finally set my plan of reviving 35 Moves into action, I think to myself as I bike across seemingly endless stretches of farmland, with the occasional car speeding by to interrupt my thoughts. However, the more I think over it, the more I realize that I would much rather take a break, and organizing a tournament that hundreds of people will be watching (since everyone knows that 35 Moves is the hypest meta there is) just doesn’t sound as fun as it did a few weeks ago. There’s always next month, after all.

So instead, I decided to cook up my most insane team yet, centered around a Pokemon no reasonable human being has ever even thought of using: Cherrim.

Admittedly, when I first checked the server this morning and saw that Hawlucha had been rerolled into Cherrim, I didn’t think much of it. Cherrim may have been the least interesting Pokemon that possibly could have been rolled, in my eyes, and I assumed it would just be forgotten alongside mons like Delcatty and Dustox. I spent most of the day studying for my upcoming CS final, eventually taking a short break to teambuild. It was then I realized that this meta actually did have a sun setter in the form of Torkoal, which was something I completely forgot to consider in my earlier analysis of Cherrim. I decided to make a sun team with it just for fun, not expecting to win more than a few games but hoping to at least cause a few people to question their sanity. The more I looked at Cherrim’s movepool and ability, however, the more I realized that this mon had serious potential. I went all out with this team, using the damage calculator to create specific EV spreads and adding multiple pivots to ensure Cherrim received as many switch-in opportunities as possible.

With the team complete, I was finally ready to take on the ladder, and to my surprise, I won every game I played. As of writing this, I am ranked #2 on the ladder, with a rating of 1338. I’ll probably push to #1 later this week, if I feel like it.