How GOOD was Salamence ACTUALLY? - History of Salamence in Competitive Pokemon (Gens 3-6)

Salamence! The Dragon Pokemon! The other Gen 3 Pseudo-legendary besides Metagross who has been dreaming about flying since it was a Bagon! Does this dragon live up to its pseudo-legendary status? Join False Swipe Gaming in this brief overview of Salamence in competitive Pokemon!

PATREON!: If you want to support FSG even more or just feeling generous, please go here!:   / falseswipegaming  

The Official False Swipe Gaming Twitter:
  / falseswipeg  

Directed by Kellen
  / kellen_fsg  
Follow Me On Twitch!:   / kellen_fsg  

Written By
Zane Bhansali aka Epengu
Follow Him:   / epengu  

DISCLAIMERS ON FORMATS COVERED:

Notice I said POPULAR formats, meaning a format where there is a significant amount of people who compete in it for tournaments and so on and so forth. Now Popular does not mean official even though two of the formats I will be covering were official formats being Japan Nintendo Cup and VGC, but it is an indicator of what a good portion of competitive players thought was “optimal” at the time. Also sometimes the Pokemon Battle Historia doesn't provide enough information to talk about certain Pokemon so I add Smogon analysis to make sense of it. This is pretty rare though.

To the people asking why I don't cover Smogon Singles for Gens 1 and 2: It wouldn't really be a history video if I covered those because online Smogon gen 1 meta to my knowledge wasn't actually played until late 2000s. I wanted to cover tournaments/competitive battling that was actually played during the early years of Pokemon (late 90s).

To the people asking why I cover Smogon at all for singles: To my knowledge, Smogon was the most popular format for Gens 3-5 and held a number of tournaments throughout the years. As for Gen 6, I am not covering Battle Spot Singles because there is more information and explanations about sets being used relative to their own meta on Smogon. In other words, there are few written analyses about Battle Spot Pokemon besides the Top tiers and I would like to avoid theorycrafting because it may have a hint of bias (though I theorycraft if I REALLY couldn't find information on a certain Pokemon). The keyword here is explanations. Though I did find statistics of most Pokemon used and most moves used, there wasn't really any explanations on why. Also the few Pokemon I did find analysis of for Top Tier Battle Spot Singles had very similar move sets to the Smogon OU sets anyway.

For the record, I do not care what rules or formats people play their battles by nor am I saying these formats are the only formats that should be played. The way you play Pokemon is between you and your opponent and I will not fault you for using evasion or whatever, I just like examining popular tournament formats.

Songs Used (List of ALL Songs used for this series. Some may or may not make it into the video):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H...

My Twitter:
  / kellen_fsg  

Resources and Historical References

History of Rule Variants: http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wik...

Smogon University:
http://www.smogon.com/

Maikiri
  / nbmakiri  

Aaron Cybertron Zheng:
  / cybertronvgc  

Pokeaim
  / joeypokeaim  

Pokemon Battle Historia:
http://pokemon.s20.xrea.com/

Nintendo Cup 2000 Team Construction:
http://pokemon.s20.xrea.com/2nd/const...

Nintendo Cup 2000 Tier List:
http://pokemon.s20.xrea.com/2nd/2000/

FULL RESEARCH SOURCES HERE:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C...

Pokemon Japanese Battle Wiki:
http://wiki.xn--rckteqa2e.com/wiki/%E...

Sprites From:
https://www.spriters-resource.com/
https://pldh.net/dex/sprites/index