catutie said:
^xatu?....am i missing something here....its not that good of a counter. sure machamp has 4 energy but ANYTHING with less than that will just take down xatu easy. xatu isnt a good counter with all the emboar running around. one turn they don't have any energy then next they have 3 and hit for 120...
well the question at hand is "what is the best counter to machamp/reuniclus" so for that, xatu is very good. running a 2-2 line could work for consistency as a tech to battle against machampiclus and only need one P energy. so fills up 6-7 spots.
against reshiboar it wouldn't be terrible in the deck...just don't be dumb enough to try playing it when you see reshiboar (not like you're going to assume you're playing against machamp anyway...if you don't see phanpy or machop at start, then don't bother getting natu/xatu out. and with poke comm's becoming so popular, if you draw on of them, then throw it into your deck and get what you want.
you'll probably only need a machamp counter in a magnezone or zekrom deck though. in zekrom, the only real deck is zekdonk. if you run that, you won't have space for natu/xatu anyway. you'll pretty much only win with that deck if you start out great. otherwise you've got a great chance of losing, just like sabledonk. zekrom/reuniclus could work theoretically, but honestly I don't think it'll be very great. that deck could use xatu though.
magnezone/emboar (the only real magnezone deck) has 2 stage 2's in it, so probably won't be a good deck for trying to fit in a stage 1. and you could just use emboar to fight anyway while building magnezone.
so technically, xatu would be perfect to counter machamp, but it isn't really all that needed. I think (going on with what glaceon was saying near the beginning of this topic) if you keep hitting them then they'll run out of places. in that case, use mandibuzz for OHKO's of your choice of their pokemon, or spiritomb TM for hand disruption and spread damage once they've accumilated too much damage across their pokemon.