How GOOD was Zapdos ACTUALLY? - History of Zapdos in Competitive Pokemon (Gens 1-6)

ZAPDOS! Team Instinct's mascot and the second of the legendary birds! How legendary was it though? Find out in this brief competitive history video with False Swipe Gaming!....tbh it was pretty legendary.

Shout Outs to my new Writer!
Zane Bhansali aka Epengu
Follow Him: https://twitter.com/epengu
Follow Me On Twitch!: http://www.twitch.tv/kellen_fsg

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/kellen_fsg

Gen 1 Battling Explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2TdCAXCDpI

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:
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 1997 Tier List:
http://pokemon.s20.xrea.com/1st/1997

Nintendo Cup 1999 Tier List:
http://pokemon.s20.xrea.com/1st/1999/

Gen 1 Zapdos Nintendo Cup Analysis:
http://pokemon.s20.xrea.com/1st/1997/thunder.html

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/

Gen 2 Nintendo Cup Zapdos Analysis:
http://pokemon.s20.xrea.com/2nd/2000/thunder.html

Zapdos Bulbapedia:
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Zapdos_(Pok%C3%A9mon)

Smogen Dex Zapdos:
http://www.smogon.com/dex/xy/pokemon/zapdos/

Nugget Bridge Blog: History of Competitive Pokemon 1996-7:
http://nuggetbridge.com/blogs/entry/1391-a-history-of-japanese-competitive-pokemon-1996-and-1997/
Nugget Bridge Blog: History of Competitive Pokemon 1998:
http://nuggetbridge.com/blogs/entry/1497-a-history-of-japanese-competitive-pokemon-1998/

^ Nuggetbridge links got taken down for some reason :( But they were essentially summaries in english of this japanese website:
http://pokemon.s20.xrea.com/ which covers official competitive 1st and 2nd Gen in Japan during 1996-2000
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

VGC Sources:

Gen 4:
http://www.smogon.com/smog/issue2/successes_at_vgc2
http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/alakas-vgc-adventure.56101/

Gen 6:
http://pokemonforever.com/Thread-VGC-15-Zapdos-Moveset-Support-Special-Attacker-3-Options
http://www.pokemon.com/us/play-pokemon/worlds/2014/teams/masters/#team-collin-heier-us-semifinalist-masters-division

Видео How GOOD was Zapdos ACTUALLY? - History of Zapdos in Competitive Pokemon (Gens 1-6) канала False Swipe Gaming