"Did I say 645 million damage? Whoops, Shuckle strikes again. Over a billion in Gen 7."

So just recently, I thought Pikachu was onto something: http://ift.tt/2qqISFP After all, Pikachu, Cubone, Marowak, and Clamperl are the only things that can get a 100% boost from the item slot while still being free to select two different moves over the final two turns, as Pikachu does there with Charge into Me First, and Charge perfectly compensates for not being able to pick on a triple type weakness, while Electric Terrain on top of it all is just gravy as there was no equivalent multiplier for that in Rollout/Ice Ball scenarios.But then as I was trying to optimize it, maybe to the point of making it fit in 28 turns, I reconsidered the purpose of every move. Pikachu does squeeze every possible ounce of efficiency out of the attacking side, but in order to make that work, the defending side's moves on the key turn must be exactly Electrify and Power Trip...there's no leeway to make them anything else. Then again, if you're already at +6 with a perfect type and terrain matchup, could the opponent's moves actually do anything to give a further boost to that?After some thought, the answer came back..."Shuckle". Not "yes", just "Shuckle". Ever since Power Trick became a move, that's how it's always been, and that's how it always will be after all: anything you can do, Shuckle can do better. Shuckle's scenario historically has not relied on the opponents using specific moves on the final turn. Thanks to some G7 additions, though, it does now, because Shuckle will not be denied its place at the top.It's even a faster setup, taking just 12 turns to come to fruition rather than 29 or 30. Some of this is due to the fact that we're not using Power Trip or Stored Power here, and thus don't need all the stats to be maxed out, but mostly because splicing 613 Attack onto a Pikachu is a very time-consuming process, whereas Shuckle just says "bam!" and gets to 614 in one move.As such, it's a lot simpler to play out in reality, so I'll go ahead and provide the demonstrations from the outset. This way you can watch along rather than just read the text script of the battle, and it's even designed to be eminently reproducible as long as you have the appropriate Pokemon. The only randomness in the entire battle is the critical hit, which has coin-flip odds so if you don't get it, it's not so bad to just restart the battle and try again. Anyway:Showdown replay: http://ift.tt/2s2CntI Battle Video: CXBG-WWWW-WWW7-5F3YNeither of those media make it possible to see the damage variation rolls, which are obviously overkill in any case, but given the final critical paid out, even the minimum roll deals 920,421,211...and the maximum roll would hit 1,082,848,464.And remember, that's just in doubles. If triple battles ever do get around to existing again for a future game, this outline is obviously extensible to a third Pokemon per side in ways that should be readily apparent, and that would allow the max damage to reach 3,654,613,494. Unless, of course, they're still using 32-bit signed integers for this kind of thing, because that figure is so huge that it would wrap around and become a negative number on such limited (and ill-sighted) architecture--in fact, it has enough steam to get over two-thirds of the way to wrapping back over to zero.I guess there's a reason for the obligatory saying about Shuckle after all. via /r/pokemon http://ift.tt/2raEgqD