KING or PEON?! - History of Nidoking in Competitive Pokemon (Gens 1-6) ft. Vish

NIDOKING! The King of the Nidos! The poison and ground type who can learn a bunch of elemental attacks for some reason! Also I can’t believe we didn’t do a Moon King reference in here but oh well. How good was Nidoking actually in competitive Pokemon? Lets find out with special guest Vish! Follow him: NOW ANNOUNCING PATREON! If you want to support FSG even more or just feeling generous, please go here!: Shout Outs to my new Writer! Zane Bhansali aka Epengu Follow Him: Follow Me On Twitch!: Twitter: 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: Resources and Historical References History of Rule Variants: # Smogon University: Maikiri Aaron Cybertron Zheng: Pokeaim Pokemon Battle Historia: Nintendo Cup 1997 Tier List: Nintendo Cup 1999 Tier List: Gen 1 1997 Nidoking Nintendo Cup Page: Nintendo Cup 2000 Team Construction: Nintendo Cup 2000 Tier List: Gen 2 Nintendo Cup Nidokingl Analysis: Nidoking Bulbapedia: (Pokémon) Smogen Dex Nidoking: Nugget Bridge Blog: History of Competitive Pokemon 1996-7: Nugget Bridge Blog: History of Competitive Pokemon 1998: ^ Nuggetbridge links got taken down for some reason :( But they were essentially summaries in english of this japanese website: which covers official competitive 1st and 2nd Gen in Japan during 1996-2000 Pokemon Japanese Battle Wiki: メインページ Sprites From: VGC Sources: NOTE: Nidoking was used in Gen 6 VGC however as far as I could find, it only appeared in one tournament which it didn’t even place top 8 and there was no other data given on the sets it used. Gen 5: