"As a player who went from MMR ~2000 to cracking the top 500 leaderboard, here are my thoughts and observations about the current GL meta"

#PokemonGO: TLDR: pancake and fruit dinosaur beat meta real goodAs someone who barely made it to rank 9 last season using a team of stunfisk, venusaur, and a spicy driflim, I was placed around 2100 at the start of this season. I dropped to around 2000 MMR real quick, mostly because my team struggled to beat the grass leads that were everywhere.I switched it up for a team of AS tropius, TS stunfisk, and IB/HP azumarill which performed much better than I expected. This team destroys grass, water, and fighting leads, and has two counters to almost everything that beats tropius. Even when I lost the lead, if I could draw out the grass type on the switch, very few teams expected a second counter to their steel or flyer. However, I had very little play against ice types, and azu dittos got old fast. Also, around the high 2300s there was a clear shift in the meta from majority grass and water leads to steely bois instead, and I began stagnating in MMR.I also noticed that most meta teams were running variations of azu, regi, and deoxys/meganium/haunter, so I made a new team to counter these lineups. I ran my pancake in the lead, with PW/FC ferrothorn, and Psychic/DP medicham. My strategy with this team was to stay in with stunfisk even if I lost the lead to altaria/deoxys because I knew that my back line could handle the azu+steel core. This team also loves to go against many of the popular lines with skarmory leads. I was able to go up to an MMR of 2484, putting me barely in the top 500 as of today. Who knows how long I will stay up there, but I wanted to make a post to share my experience and show that it is still possible to climb the ranks with anti-meta teams.The more predictable the meta becomes, the easier it is to beat basic lines. Both of my teams have weaknesses (ice types for the first, and altaria/tropius for the second) but I was able to take advantage of meta patterns and basic team comps to advance my MMR rapidly. I hope this helps some people who are getting tired of same lineups or GBL in general because these teams were fun to play and surprising capable of flipping lost leads. via /r/TheSilphRoad https://ift.tt/3egHGgE