Tinkaton is a really cool anti-meta pick at the moment

There was a really cool team from Oliver Gausden on stream during Birmingham Regionals today that used Tinkaton next to Sludge Wave + Choice Specs Eternatus, and he managed to win against a CSR balance team and even brought Tinkaton to one of the games.

I’m pretty familiar with this tech because I’ve used Vijay Sood’s Reg G team a bit (https://pokepast.es/51eeac46ef4f6987) which uses Tinkaton next to a booster energy Iron Moth with Sludge Wave. Now that it made an appearance on stream I wanna express my love for that stupid little pokemon.

I cannot stress enough how good Mold Breaker Fake Out (and Feint if you run that too, which is my personal favorite move) is in a format where Farigiraf has the 7th highest usage on Day 1 of a Regional. So many teams run Farigiraf as a bandaid for weakness to fake out, and Mold Breaker completely forces them to rethink their plan on the spot. Slightly more niche, but just as cool — Mold Breaker also allows you to OHKO Ogerpon Cornerstone through Sturdy.

Perhaps even more used than Farigiraf, however, is extremely strong pokemon with Tera Fairy. Koraidon (91%), Calyrex-Shadow Rider (22%), and Raging Bolt (41%) all very commonly run tera fairy on high level ladder at the moment. With Gigaton Hammer’s base 160 attack, it threatens any fairy type in the game with ridiculous damage even off of its puny attack stat, which is especially important for pokemon that rely on tera fairy to get them out of common weaknesses. Just having Tinkaton forces players to reconsider using their fairy tera.

For example:

188 Atk Tinkaton Gigaton Hammer vs. 20 HP / 4 Def Tera Fairy Miraidon: 180-212 (101.1 - 119.1%) -- guaranteed OHKO

188 Atk Tinkaton Gigaton Hammer vs. 132 HP / 84 Def Tera Fairy Calyrex-Shadow: 194-230 (101 - 119.7%) -- guaranteed OHKO

I used two of the more common spreads for these mons and even at a laughable 119 attack, Tinkaton threatens a guaranteed OHKO if they choose to tera.

When you factor in a ridiculously good defensive typing (9 resistances and 2 immunities), good special bulk (especially one with an assault vest like the one I was using), solid move set even beyond the moves I’ve mentioned and respectable speed, I really think Tinkaton is good enough to carve out a little role for itself in Reg G.

Farigiraf and Tera fairy mons aren’t going anywhere. At the very least it’s a cool fake out user you can try if you’re sick of using Rilla/Incin and getting blocked by the giraffe