How GOOD was Heracross ACTUALLY? - History of Heracross in Competitive Pokemon (Gens 2-6)

HERACROSS! The Single Horn Pokemon! We all know this Pokemon as one of the toughest bug Pokemon there is! But was it actually that tough? Join False Swipe Gaming in this brief overview of Heracross as we examine how it fared in popular competitive metagames over the years!

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Directed & Edited by Kellen
http://www.twitter.com/kellen_fsg
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Sound Edited by Ryan Gonzales
http://ryangonzalesfilmmaker.weebly.com/

Written By
Zane Bhansali aka Epengu
Follow Him: https://twitter.com/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.

Song Used:
See End of Video

My Twitter:
http://www.twitter.com/kellen_FSG

Resources and Historical References

History of Rule Variants: http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Rule_variants#Nintendo_Cup_.2799

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

Maikiri
http://www.twitter.com/NBmakiri

Aaron Cybertron Zheng:
https://twitter.com/CybertronVGC

Pokeaim
https://twitter.com/JoeyPokeaim

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

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

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

FULL RESEARCH SOURCES HERE:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U56VoCxzoKhzv2hqBuRsHL5nWFgi8zexYnDo_iHG1iY/edit?usp=sharing

Pokemon Japanese Battle Wiki:
http://wiki.xn--rckteqa2e.com/wiki/%E3%83%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B3%E3%83%9A%E3%83%BC%E3%82%B8

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

Видео How GOOD was Heracross ACTUALLY? - History of Heracross in Competitive Pokemon (Gens 2-6) канала False Swipe Gaming