Idea behind the disaster known as Ice Arceus

So I was going to do an expose on Giratina and Giratina-O and the deficiencies they leave in DPP Ubers, but that's a big undertaking and I've recently just moved house and I've had no time.

In the meantime, UWL has been going and I've admitted been doing pretty badly mainly seeing as I'm playing Farceus.

Heads turned when I brought Iceceus vs Seldanna in week 1, so I'm going to do a bit of a plug (and also caution) for Iceceus.

So the set I used for my Iceceus team was:


Arceus-Ice @ Icicle Plate  

Ability: Multitype  

EVs: 100 HP / 100 Def / 100 SpA / 100 SpD / 100 Spe  

Timid Nature  

IVs: 0 Atk  

- Substitute  

- Calm Mind  

- Ice Beam / Judgment

- Recover


Lets get the downsides out of the way - this thing is walled by Kyogre in general and is weak to Rocks and still takes Spikes and Tspikes damage. It still gets destroyed by lots of Steel-types which means it's pretty easy to stop. So why use this?

The main appeal of this Iceceus set is its matchup against common stall/semi-stall setups. Rain stall isn't very common due to the fact that it simply is harder to defend with rain up and you're just super susceptible to Thunder paralysis and asking for trouble. The bulk of stall/semi-stall structures tend to use things like Groudon, Blissey, Skarmory/Forretress, Cresselia/Lugia, Giratina formes, Latias. Seldanna has also been known to use Quagsire on occasion.

Mono-attacking Arceus is a good way to punish teams heavily dependent on Blissey to weather their special attacks. The problem is most mono-attacking Arceus formes will get themselves blocked by something else, be in Skarm (Dragon, Dark, Steel), Latias (Dragon, Rock) or Groudon (Rock). Keep in mind these are the formes that don't have anything immune/4x weak to them. Iceceus is the only one of these that can hit pretty much all of these things neutrally. It's resisted by things like Bronzong and Forretress, but those don't always run Steel-type moves and therefore can't actually break Iceceus's subs most of the time. As for Kyogre matchups, you should try and get Toxic Spikes or just heavy Spikes up so you can limit the number of times that Kyogre can switch-in; Resttalk ones are kind of rare at the moment.

I felt these qualities made Iceceus ideal vs Seldanna I felt because she tends to gravitate towards these kinds of teams.

TTar is also pretty common on stall builds, which make things harder for Iceceus, but I feel it's a bit easier to chip down vs something like... Groudon.

Moves are pretty self-explanatory. Sub/CM/Recover lets you pressure stall a lot. Ice Beam vs Judgement is really up to you - they have the same PP, and the tradeoff is 5 base power vs 10% freeze chance.

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