July 30, 2015

Team Focus: Owngrinders
P/P Curious Wolvar Pup (Bite, Snap Trap, Whirlwind)
H/P Graves (Skull Toss, BONESTORM, Grave Destruction)
P/S Stonegrinder (Screeching Gears, Thunderbolt, Clean-Up)

I was looking to use some of the less used AoE moves like Whirlwind. It’s evenly split now so I figured it would be effective in our current meta. There are only four pets with Whirlwind so I didn’t have too many options. I never even got to all of them beacuase I stopped when I paired the Curious Wolvar Pup with Graves. I wish I could say that I was in evil genius mode and planned this all out, but that would be a lie. In one of the first battles with this team I had to face Graves, the first thing I did was to lay a trap. Bam, Graves used Grave Destruction and set the trap off, stunning himself. It was both awesome and hilarious. I never looked back.

I know that I’ve called for trap to be nerfed many, many times. I still believe that it is overpowered because it does three things: it interrupts, damages and stuns. That’s a lot of bang for your buck. Defenders of traps say that it is balanced by rng since you don’t know when it will go off, but I don’t think that is enough balance.

Due to the random nature of trap this team will never be one of the best, but it has been quite fun to play so far. I don’t usually like this much rng but I suppose I was getting bored with same ol’, same ol’ so this team has allowed me to change things up. I almost always start the same way: the pup lays a trap then uses Whirlwind, then stays in until it dies. If the trap goes off it can get off a second Whirlwind and sometimes even a second trap. Usually it dies before that. I really don’t mind, I’ll even even a Haunt with it. I bring in Graves for the three AoE treatment, and now I have some control over when the trap will detonate. I’ll then bring in Stonegrinder as a sweeper. I originally tried an MPD as a sweeper, but after being caught one on one with an undead laughing at my weak attack I switched to Stonegrinder. Screeching Gears has won a few battles for me with the stun, but most of all I wanted Thunderbolt and a second way to detonate the trap.

Battle 1
vs. MPD, Graves, Spawn Of G’Nathus
073015BThe the trap went off at a good time for me during the initial match-up of my pup and the aquatic. The stun allowed me to kill the aquatic and then get off a second Whirlwind, but a high hitting Skull Toss prevented my second trap from going down. I didn’t want to leave my Stonegrinder versus the MPD so I brought it out next. After Thunderbolt I stunned Graves with Screeching Gears which made my opponent put hands on hips, pout lips, stomp feet and say “no fayur”, then run away.

Battle 2
vs. Waterfly, Swamp Croaker, Eternal Strider
073015AGoing into this battle my biggest concern wasn’t the two aquatics, it was the possibility of my trap going off right after the frog had cast Bubble. Guess what happened? Bubble is cast, trap detonates. Oh well. That happened in the beginning of the battle. I’m surprised I can remember that far back since this was a thirty-four round battle. My opponent spent many rounds swapping in the fly, casting Dodge, then healing, then swapping out. I never felt any danger of losing, only a danger of becoming eligible for social security before the battle ended.

Battles 3 – 5
0:43 Fossilized Hatchling, Graves, Weebomination

6:07 Molten Corgi, Infinite Whelpling, Menagerie Custodian

10:37 Molten Corgi, Infinite Whelpling, Menagerie Custodian

While I was waiting for the video to upload I beat the triple undead AoE team two more times :)

22 Responses to July 30, 2015

  1. tekulve says:

    In your last 2 days of posts, just 1 out of the 10 teams you faced had more than 1 undead pet in their comp…and you faced no valks or fragments of anger in the 10 fights and you faced the MpD 2/10 times.

    This never happens in my meta.. at least 30-40% of my battle opp. have 2 undead and the FoA is pretty common. I expect to face an MpD in 40+% of my matches.

    Just some observations…overall, your meta has always shown much more variety than mine since I started reading your blog.

    • Discodoggy says:

      Yeah I have a nice meta. If anything, I’m the bully now. What happens is that I’ll get beat by an MPD or Graves and run my top teams three or four times in a row hoping for revenge.

      For this last run of Owngrinders I have no excuse. I was simply amazed at having so much fun with a pet I had never given much play (the Curious Wolvar Pup). I’m already suffering the consequences, as I’ve faced a couple of trap teams today. If you beat someone enough with a certain pet they are bound to copy it.

  2. Discodoggy says:

    This team got to 100 faster than any of my other “Hundred Win Club” teams, going 100-5-2, narrowly beating out Rich Girls at 100-8. I would not expect to win at that rate in the next 100 battles since there were so many times that I only won because the trap went off at exactly the right moment, or I got the stun I needed that would have otherwise resulted in a loss. Basically, I was extremely lucky and could have easily gone 85-20-2.

  3. Vevy says:

    I love the Pup and even though I’ve used him a few times in the past month, I had largely shelved him due to Graves. Like you, I tend to see him as part of a fun team. I’m impressed that you’ve actually had such success here. I’ll give it a try. I don’t own Lil’ Rag, so the Pup is my only trap pet.

    I keep checking in on the blog though with 6.2, I’ve been PvEing rather than pet battling. Keep up the good work!

  4. Harpua says:

    Death Talon Whelpguard + Whirlwind + Dragonkin racial = Big fun

    Traps are funny. Until you run up against a sweeping move. Then they are kind of useless.

    • Josh says:

      No, because as demonstrated numerous times in the video, sweeping moves detonate the trap.

    • Discodoggy says:

      I wonder if the mechanic of sweep moves setting off traps is deliberate. It does sort of make sense, if I tried to use a broom to get rid of a trap it worul most likely go off. Now I know it’s getting late, I’m trying to apply “real-life” logic to pet battles.

  5. Loki says:

    Love the Curious Wolver, this last weekend I teamed him up with Snarly and s\s Darkmoon rabbit and got the 5 wins for the weekend quest from the first 5 battles.

  6. Josh says:

    Used it twice in a row, lost twice in a row, albeit against two OP teams. Despite this team’s record for you it just ran into a brick wall in my meta…

    • Discodoggy says:

      That’s too bad that it didn’t work for you. Was it bad rng with the trap? Owngrinders and Rick Frostly are my go-to teams when I’m facing a lot of the MPD and Graves. It’s 197-15-1 now. Damn I use it a lot.

      • Josh says:

        I think both teams had Graves and MPD in (you think they’re common on your meta!) and one had an S/S rabbit whilst the other had a Ghastly Kid. The trap simply didn’t get me enough of an advantage to capitalise on and my sweeper always had too much to sweep (and/or was slower than the other pet) towards the end of the battle. If the humanoid starts against Graves to lay a trap then yes Graves will probably stun itself and take some damage but will still do far more damage (including killing the CWP pretty handily) before he expires. Either that or I was taking a Haunt to the face.

        To be honest this is too good a team for you for me to not try it again. My general policy is that any team I use for the first time (mine, yours or someone else’s) should win its first two battles to make it on the roster. Owngrinders has clearly fallen foul of this despite a second chance but it couldn’t have faced worse teams so I’ll give it another shot in future.

  7. Stevia says:

    Ever since I’ve found your site this team was one of my favorite. ^^ At least initially on my meta few months ago it was actually a constant chain-win without a single fail for quite a while. Before that I barely knew how to pet battle properly, had only a tiny bit of pvp experience and my win rate was something like 20%, so it was a quite drastic improvement for me. Tbh the only reason I used it in first place was that I had all 3 of those pets leveled, and there weren’t many alternatives at that time.

    The only thing is I didn’t read this description before using it, so my tactic was slightly different: I used a trap, then depending on the opponent, used whirlwind or even just swapped to Graves asap (if the opponent had undead attack). Then triggered the trap with Graves as soon as it was appropriate, usually following by bonestorm. And then swapped back to the cub just in time for second trap and ww (if it wasn’t too risky because cub’s health is a pio). Cub is fragile, but unless there is backline aoe (when I started it for some reason there wasn’t all that much of it), he lasted for 2-4 traps most of the time. After Graves’s gone, Clean-Up seemed to do the same trick, not to mention against many teams it was better to go with the stonegrinder at first half of the fight.

    Later, however, my meta adapted (and pretty sure it wasn’t anywhere near my doing), and right now it’s more of 60-70% win rate, but still not that bad. Teams with strong aoe and/or backline healing countering it pretty hard. Especially things like 3x MPD or 3x any_selfhealing_elementals e.g. Sunflowers.

    Anyway, just saying thanks for the work. :) It’s very unlikely I’d ever get enough motivation to get into pvp petbattles myself without any resource to learn from. And now at least I have something to do while doing boring stuff like monitoring AH undercuts.

    • Discodoggy says:

      Nice to see it working for you, at least initially. I’m still sticking to the strategy of keeping the wolvar in against Graves. I find that swapping will lead to my death on the back line so I do what damage I can while out front. A lot depends on when the trap detonates.

      Thanks for the comment!

  8. Sternish says:

    Hey Disco, wanted to give you some kudos for a win I got tonight. I generally avoid using Graves as I’m not really into using high-powered teams, but the queue this night was particularly rough with not but top tier pets in every match. So I decided to use your Own Grinders team to see how it would fair.

    The timing was perfect I suppose. The team I ran into wasn’t a terribly tough team by any stretch, but it was the pet names that got me. I was going to attach a screen shot of the win but it’s probably not necessary. The team was:

    Unborn Val’kyr (Umustbereallymad)
    Chi-Chi (Uknowurpathetic)
    Darkmoon Zeppelin (Uprayforluckhaha)

    Anyway, I’m glad I had a team loaded up to mash this person’s guts out. Almost never do I take a pet battle personally, but that crap really irks me. So, thanks for the team, it was put to good use tonight. =)

  9. Rhonstifor says:

    I believe this to be the most evil team you have created. Someone was playing it, and beating me soundly. So, I decided to play it a while to better understand it and its weaknesses. Won 36 straight with only a couple being close. Pure evil.

  10. Discodoggy says:

    I agree this is the most evil team I’ve ever made. I was in fear that someone would start running it against me, but it only happened a few times.

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