Bazaro

Dark has 2 of the best Porygon2 counters in the whole game; Sableye and Muk-A, you only mentioned that, not the types that suffer against it. Dragon suffers a lack of defensive mons that can take Ice Beams, deal with Toxics, AND actually manage to KO the thing. Ground is the same way if Porygon2 is carrying Toxic. As for Aegislash taking over Metagross's role as a Steel powerhouse on teams, I mentioned above that Scizor/Excadrill would fill that role better. And it's not like regular Metagross is unviable, I think it will actually remain a high-tier threat.

You know, there's 10 people who've voted "Don't Ban" on both sides, and I think I've seen 1 maybe 2 arguments for them so far. I'd really like to hear more about this. Some other mons that concern me personally are Porygon2 (read below) and Garchomp. Garchomp is really awkward because it isn't broken, it's just really really good. It can tank, it can sweep, it can revenge, it can support, all with the same moveset. There's almost no variation on its sets, with a total of 6 viable moves (about the same as Megagross): Earthquake, Dragon Claw, Rock Slide, Fire Blast, Swords Dance, and Stealth Rock. It also has one of the highest usage rates since Season 1, and has really centralized teambuilding as *the* Ground type, the next competition being Excadrill. I don't think it's banworthy, but it's something to keep in mind. Some Pokemon are very hard on certain leaders, having absolutely 0 counters to them. Off the top of my head, Excadrill for Electric, Serperior for Ground, and Ninetales-A/Mamoswine for Dragon come to mind. It'd be ideal to give leaders a fighting chance to these kinds of threats... thoughts? Diving into comment section... Aegislash isn't really comparable to Megagross as the two fill very different roles in Redemption (sweeper/wallbreaker vs support/tank). I'd like to see more replays from everybody if possible, but this particular one seems to just be bad plays/teambuilding at fault. Porygon2 has an interesting reputation. It's the best wall by far due to taking virtually any hit in the game, on top of getting Recover and optional utility in Trick Room/Toxic. It's not entirely passive either due to Download and Ice Beam/Thunderbolt's powerful coverage. We thought about removing Eviolite too, and this was the main problem we ran into. On top of the possible Aegislash ban, Steel/Ghost would have to rely on Doublade for covering possible threats, or suffer losing an entire line of Pokemon from their already-limited tools. Some leaders get very sparce Knock Off distribution (Dragon, Electric, Fairy, etc...) and sometimes can't afford to Toxic stall the +1 Porygon2 who has perfect coverage for their type. Dragon in particular struggles against the duck, who avoids KOs from even titans like Choice Band Haxorus. It's really kind of ridiculous the amounts of hits it can survive. Smogon's Monotype tiering deals with Monotypes vs other Monotypes so I really don't think that reasoning works here. This is sort of like Monotype vs (usually) OU/UU based. Doesn't Mega Scizor and Skarmory stop Earthquake users...? Fire Blast Garchomp is a different story because Steel has no realistic walls to Fire+Ground coverage anyways. Megagross does outspeed these, but they can easily run Choice Scarf to beat it. Without Megagross and Aegislash, Excadrill, Scizor, regular Metagross and maybe Lucario will rise in usage as "superior Steel types," so we're in no shortage here. Winning by 50/50 is winning by luck which is something we really try to avoid. A League is supposed to test skill and teambuilding, rather than sheer luck. With the current way League is run, there's lots of cases where battles can only be won with hax, especially in higher brackets. Unfortunately, the already-struggling lower brackets get haxed on just as much as higher brackets. Keep in mind that leaders need to win every match while Challengers only need to be lucky once. Leaders can run whatever sets they want, it's typically tuned to whatever is best vs the current Challenger. As for players, Substitute is virtually non-existent in Trainer Cards due to the way Redemption teambuilding works. Steel types were the typical answer, but most are vulnerable to Foul Play (Excadrill, Metagross, Aegislash, Scizor). Only one Poison type really saw use in Redemption: Venusaur. It doesn't stop Porygon2 from running Psychic to beat it either, and Normal is in no shortage of Normal/Flying types that can beat Venusaur. Taunt is uncommon but it's an option, it can shut down Toxic, Trick Room, and Recover on it. But Porygon2 isn't very passive either, and its BeamBolt coverage can hit the Taunters like Serperior, Gyarados and Mandibuzz. Ghosts are pretty rare on challenger teams too, with Dhelmise (Foul Play/Ice Beam) Chandelure (Foul Play/Toxic) and Aegislash (Foul Play on Blade + ban) being the most common. Trick is almost exclusively limited to Rotom here, but it does have some pretty high usage.

So with Season 2 coming to a close here soon, it's a good time to look back on all that's been done and what we can learn from it. So let's talk mons. Here, please feel free to talk relevant discussion on the current metagame of Redemption, particularly specific mons. Note this this will have no effect on the current Season, only afterwards. Mega Metagross Greninja Aegislash Comment Section Porygon2

I use Paint.Net and haven't run into any transparency issues with .png. At first it tries to save everything to .pdn or .jpeg, but you can change that easily. GG and Gimp take a bit more effort to learn than Paint, but they have more tools available if you're into those. I've found everything I need for spriting on Paint for the past several years. It's all on preference, really.

I don't know if this was brought up anywhere and I haven't seen anything here but spoiler tags are kinda ugly: Spoiler tags have a bad tendency to doublespace the whole comment for no apparent reason when posted. Only happens during the first post, editing a spoiler doesn't cause this. If you put a spoiler inside a spoiler, and then continue typing after the second spoiler (but still inside the first spoiler) it'll post fine. When you go back to edit the message, you cannot edit anything past the second spoiler. I couldn't even select text to Ctrl+X, but I could Ctrl+X the entire spoiler. Basically get your spoiler tags right the first time or else. And given the above bullet, that's rarely the case. Probably some more stuff, I haven't looked into spoiler tags much myself, but these are some things I've ran into. I know I'm not the only people who've ran into these either.

EDIT: Stupid Forum formatting destroyed this post. Half of it's out of order and this is just a huge pain. Will fix this when possible. I'm not a good teacher or anything so I'll just give the step-by-step of what I normally do. I'll try to answer questions and the sort

These look pretty good, but some things look a little too angular and straight, namely the spots. Eyes are pretty hard to do too. As for the differences in front and back, since I assume you pulled these from Reborn, that's because Reborn uses HGSS front sprites but BW backsprites, so some sprites have differences across generations (I know Gardevoir line and Ivysaur do, there's several others) In my opinion, the BW pallets are much better, so if you'd want to unify the colors, take from the backsprites. If I have anything else done I'll post it here. Also should get a tutorial going so more people can try this...

Blaziken can't learn Close Combat. This is why we use the Rate My Team Thread first...

That was the original intention yes, but one person can't do all 800 Pokemon + forms + backsprites + everything else realistically, plus I'm busy with other things like life. Would be nice to see an entire game in high res.

This is sort of a resurrection of an old thread of mine. It takes a bit of time, but it's not too difficult to make these kinds of sprites. I might try to make some kind of tutorial in the future (might) but I recommend trying to make one yourself, it's pretty enjoyable. The title says it all, really, here's some stuff:

Sure, you can battle him if you restart! ^u^

You don't need Rocks on both Marowak and Empoleon. Rock Slide is probably better than Stone Edge on Golem because it hits both enemies in Doubles/Triples. You also have nothing immune or even resisting Earthquake or Ground in general. Your own Earthquake will hurt you a lot if you're not careful. Dazzling Gleam and Moonblast on Gardevoir isn't necessary, maybe drop Gleam for Hyper Voice in case you wanted to use Mega Gardevoir for some battles? No Trick Room, Taunt, Fake Out, or Tailwind, so most Triples-based leaders will not be kind to you with their speed control. Nothing with setup means bulky Singles-based leaders like Ground, Water, and Normal can wall you pretty easily since you have almost no way to get around their various wall cores (Gliscor + Gastrodon, Quagsire + Mantine) Just some ideas.

Booboo Keys is open? I can wait

Sign me up

So when's the real field effect info?

I heard you guys like this bear- er, despair! I admittedly half-assed this. Use it if you want, or don't, I've already had my fun either way.

It was difficult enough finding our leaders who were willing to help out following the schedules they do. It's just not realistic to ask everyone who beats the league to hang around for us for an extra Champion battle. As the champions stack up, it really just becomes an ugly mess. Perhaps the title of "Champion" was misleading. Look to people who defeat Oliver as "Hall-of-Famers" rather than "Champions." It carries the same honors, but doesn't get confused with the role Oliver currently stands in.

Here's a quick Avalugg sprite I did. If you want, I can make a better one in time: Whoever made the Avalugg frontsprite needs a stern talking to about shade moderation :I

I just checked the original sprite and you're correct. But there's still Hoopa and probably a few other extra pixels out there...

There's some extra white pixels on the back of the neck... And several places, mostly around the earrings and the arms. They were already there on the base sprites, @Jan might want to go over the base sprites that have the extra white pixels.

The smaller snowflakes are the wrong resolution. I don't know what Jan says to this, but I do know it won't show up pretty in a small window of the game. On my side of things, have a dog

The biggest problem I'm noticing with the Goodra colors is that the different shades are too close together. Try making the darer shades a little darker (so the darkest green looks nice next to the black) and keep the lightest green where it is. It's good for the spacing between shades to be as equal as possible across the whole sprite unless you want a particular detail to stick out.