As someone who had to drive 30 minutes to get to the house of the only friend I had that still played Pokemon when Black and White released, you can imagine I wasn't a huge fan of trade evolutions. You always have to love when Game Freak doubles down on an idea by adding barely differing iterations. Oh, you have to trade to evolve your Haunter. Now you have to trade AND have Electabuzz hold an item to get it to evolve. Now you have to trade your Karrablast specifically for a Shelmet to have them both evolve. Blah, at least there haven't been any weird new trade evolutions since our buggy friends hit the scene.
The above notwithstanding, Escavalier and Accelgor are actually pretty cool. The former Unova champion is even known to have used both at times. They fall directly into the slow but tanky and fast but frail archetype, respectively, and I honestly did not have a good idea of what to do with them when I started this project. Looking at their competitive history, they actually both were able to carve out a niche in the RU tier for a while, but both have since dropped to the bottom tiers as new, stronger threats keep emerging. While I could just double down and make Escavalier tankier and Accelgor hit harder, I'm taking a different route here. I want to lean into their designs and use some Abilities to make them feel more like their namesakes. To that end, I'm going to mix it up and start with a discussion of Abilities first as this will play into how we want to structure their stats and movepools.
1. Abilities
Let me just say woof, these Pokemon did not last so long in RU because of their Abilities. These things are doing nothing. Sticky Hold? Swarm? It will not be hard to think up better options. For Accelgor, I definitely want to play more into its ninja attributes. It should be able to do something unique that other Pokemon can't with a ninja-esque ability or two. Here are my ideas:
- Master of Disguise: Doubles the HP of created Substitutes
- Master of Traps: Intensifies field effect moves
- Dry Skin
Master of Disguise is pretty straightforward and gives Accelgor fantastic opportunities to survive longer and set up whatever it wants with some of the bulkiest substitutes in the game. Master of Traps I think I need to explain more in depth. By "field effect moves" I am talking about anything that is changing conditions on the field for multiple turns that is not weather or terrain. Moves like Gravity, Trick Room, Wonder Room, Magic Room, Water Sport, Mud Sport, and the secondary effects of Water/Grass/Fire Pledge affect how moves or stats work on both sides of the battle. To also give credit to the trap side, this ability is also affecting moves like Spikes, Toxic Spikes, Sticky Web, and Stealth Rock.
So now we know what moves are affected by Master of Traps, but what does intensify mean? In most cases, this is just an extension of turns that the field effect remains on the field. All the "Room" moves, Water/Mud Sport, Gravity, and the Pledge move effects will have their turns increased to 8 from 5 (or 4 for the Pledge moves). Of course, the hazard moves like Spikes do not have a turn limit, so those moves will instead have their effect boosted in various ways. A Pokemon with this ability will put down two layers of Spikes and Toxic Spikes instead of 1 whenever it uses the move, Sticky Web will sharply decrease speed, and Stealth Rock will have its damage boosted by 25% for each damage stage. Note that Accelgor will not have access to Sticky Web and Stealth Rock, but perhaps you'll run into an enemy with those moves and this ability.
I know it all comes across as pretty messy, and if it is it's because Game Freak has never grouped these moves together in a category before so I'm blazing new trails here. I'm probably even missing some relevant moves here because it's so hard to search for moves that affect the battlefield. Short of Trick Room and the hazard rooms, none of these moves have seen the light of day despite having really cool effects. Accelgor makes an ideal user of these moves, being fast enough to get things set up quickly, and Master of Traps extends the duration enough to make them actually worth considering.
Finally, Dry Skin. Just flavor to go with its Pokedex entries that I think is more interesting than Hydration. Phew, ok, time for Escavalier!
- Lightning Charge: Doubles speed when using piercing moves
- Stalwart
- Shell Armor
Escavalier gets its own fancy new ability here with Lightning Charge. Once again, I'm introducing a new category of "piercing" moves, and whenever Escavalier presses the attack with one of these moves it gets doubled speed for that turn to dish out big damage fast. Moves like Megahorn, Smart Strike, Poison Jab, Fell Stinger, and Drill Run will all fall into this category. Essentially, if it is a move that entails Escavalier stabbing you head on with its massive lances, it will be a piercing move. This ability not only plays into its design (and its species name is literally the "cavalry Pokemon") but also gives credence to the Pokedex entries talking about how it flies around at high speed. Yeah, it was never doing that with a base 20 Speed stat. In the next section, we'll look at how we'll be padding up Escavalier's Speed slightly so it can actually make good use of this ability.
A quick aside, I did consider having this ability just give +1 priority to piercing moves. It would be easier to code, but I think it would be far too powerful. Having priority on such high base power moves that span multiple types would be too oppressive and the only counter would be an enemy with their own priority moves, most of which would be far weaker than the moves Escavalier gets access to. Having this ability double Speed instead allows natural out-speeding by the opponent and opens up counter-play through things like Paralysis and other forms of speed control.
Stalwart is a fitting ability to any knightly Pokemon and strikes me as an ability Escavalier would have started with if it had existed in Gen 5. It also lets the player ensure that a high priority target is taken out with Escavalier's high Attack regardless of shenanigans by the opponent. Finally, Shell/Battle Armor is a great fit for teams that need that defensive edge. It's buff that reduces damage from Steel and Rock moves make Escavalier one of the only Pokemon in the whole game that can actually resist Rock types and could make this ability worth considering over the offensive power of Lightning Charge.
Ok, that's a wrap! Geeze, what a wall of text. Now that we have some new and/or improved roles defined for Escavalier and Accelgor, let's see how we can support these design goals in their stats and movepools.
2. Stats
Escavalier is getting its bottom of the barrel Speed stat boosted to...33! While this barely seems like an improvement, looking at the math tells a very different story. Assuming a neutral Nature and a player that doesn't EV train at all and only picks up EV points naturally through the game, we'd expect Escavalier to end up somewhere around 46ish speed by level 50. This is enough, when doubled via Lightning Charge, to outspeed Pokemon with 85 base speed such as Nidoking. Not too shabby. Now let's assume that the player actually puts some effort into raising Escavalier's speed. This would let it cap out as high as 85 speed at level 50. Boosting this with Lightning Charge has Escavalier out-speeding Pokemon with base Speed stats of 115, or even 120 if the opponent's speed is not maxed! If you give Escavalier a Speed-boosting nature, it can now always out-speed base Speed 120 Pokemon with neutral natures or base Speed 115 Pokemon with Speed-boosting natures. That's pretty dang fast! If the player knows to invest in Speed, Escavalier is swinging as fast as the speedsters, and even without investment it is far out-speeding any other tanky, defensively oriented opponents.
With the above in mind, I am nerfing Escavalier's base Attack from 135 to 115 so it is not too overpowered. To compensate, I've improved its bulk with base 90 HP from base 70. These changes should allow Escavalier to comfortably tank hits with ease if the player focuses on defense or hit hard and fast while still being decently bulky if the player opts to use Lightning Charge.
For Accelgor, we're dropping its Speed a bit to 129 (which still leaves it only second to Ninjask among non-legendary Bug types) so we can pad out its survivability. I'm only buffing its defenses to 65 from 60 Defense and Sp. Defense, but I'm ratcheting up HP to a whopping 109. Combined with Master of Disguise, we are looking at some absolutely massive Substitutes that Accelgor can set up. This is balanced by Accelgor's mediocre offenses and lack of good boosting moves.
3. Movepool
Escavalier essentially has everything it already needs in the moves department. To add some defensive utility, I'll throw in Wide Guard so it can provide some additional support to its allies. I don't think it needs anything more for offensive moves unless I later think of another cool move that would work with Lightning Charge. Icicle Spear perhaps?
Accelgor will get a few more changes to let it properly utilize its new abilities. Substitute will now be part of its level-up learnset, and it will either directly learn or get access to via tutor the Pledge moves, Gravity, Trick, Wonder, and Magic Room, and Spikes/Toxic Spikes. I'm also going to throw in Flattery so it can do some shenanigans with Flattery and Power Swap. Everything else we will leave as is with strong options like Encore, Giga Drain, Water Shuriken, Yawn, and Toxic.
Conclusion
I'm finding something interesting as we progress through the list. More and more as the generations go on and the list of Pokemon keeps getting longer, Game Freak is leaning more into Abilities as a way to differentiate Pokemon that would otherwise be surprisingly similar. We did the same here with Accelgor very clearly differentiating itself from Ninjask and Escavalier stepping away from its slow and bulky brethren too. While I don't want to overly rely on spiffy custom abilities, there will definitely be more times in the future where this will be necessary so every Bug type in this game can have a chance to shine.
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