One dangerously underrated Pokémon crushed the meta at huge Scarlet and Violet tournament

Since the beginning of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s Regulation E, the VGC meta has been loaded with physical attackers like Ogerpon, Iron Hands, and Landorus—but the winner of the Sacramento Regionals this weekend found the perfect surprise Pokémon and strategy to counter all the huge physical threats.

The 12 most-used Pokémon in Sacramento were exactly what we expected—tons of physical attackers with only a few special attackers like Flutter Mane and Heatran hanging in.

We did not expect, however, the clear MVP of the tournament to be the Gen VII pseudo-legendary Kommo-o on champion Michael Zhang’s team.

The Dragon/Fighting-type Pokémon was only just added to Scarlet and Violet through The Teal Mask DLC last month, and this was its big break, proving to be the answer to beating the other physical attackers. But what is it about Kommo-o that specifically enables it to counter the popular physical threats in the meta?

With Fighting as one of its types, Kommo-o can take advantage of the popular Body Press + Iron Defense strategy. This allows the pseudo-legendary to boost its physical defense while simultaneously powering up Body Press, which calculates damage based on the user’s Defense instead of Attack. 

Since there are so many physical threats, there wasn’t much to stop Zhang’s bulky Kommo-o from getting all set up with Iron Defense before dishing out huge damage with Body Press. 

On top of that, Zhang’s team crippled physical attackers even more with Intimidate and Will-O-Wisp from Hisuian Arcanine. His Tyranitar also set up the sand to do chip damage. Between Intimidate, Will-O-Wisp, and sandstorm, Kommo-o was able to take physical hits and secure a bunch of knockouts in the finals match against Riley Factura, who’d already won Pittsburgh Regionals just a month ago. In fact, Kommo-o was responsible for seven of the eight knockouts in the Pokémon finals, which is no easy feat in these intense VGC battles.

Seeing how Factura’s second-place team consisted of all physical attackers aside from the support Amoonguss, this is a huge sign we need to bring more special attackers back to handle emerging threats like Kommo-o and Hisuian Arcanine who were specifically built to counter this physical Pokémon metagame.

Flutter Mane has already been on a slight decline after previously being the strongest Pokémon in Scarlet and Violet VGC for an impressive stretch, and other special attackers like Heatran and Chi-Yu just haven’t been able to keep up with the likes of Ogerpon and Landorus.

Hopefully, Kommo-o’s strong Sacramento showing will encourage players to start adding a few more special attackers to their teams for the next big tournaments.