Furret

Hi All
Talking about Furret today – the strangely huge generation 2 Pokemon that has really got a raw deal so far, but received some little-known buffs in gen 7. How much do they help?

Well first let’s consider how good Furret was before then see how much the buffs help. Please leave a like if you enjoy this content and give your support to Furret!

Early route normal type, therefore underwhelming on paper. But particularly sad because most have been buffed now – Alolan Rat has Normal/Dark great STAB with powerful Hustle, Linoone gets amazing moveset combo of belly + E-Speed, Lop has a mega, Stoutland has always been good, Diggersby has Huge Power, and at least GUmshoos has a unique ability and very high attack stat! The only comparable mon is Watchog, which also has it pretty tough.
Furret’s Only decent stats are speed, which still isn’t amazing, and HP, which is decent but bad defences ruin this. Has to rely on a mediocre attack stat. Only useful ability in battle Is Frisk, though this is one of its biggest selling points.
Furret can make an OK scout. You automatically find out the opponent’s item, can U-Turn out, revenge KO heavily weakened mons, and even Trick a choice item on to walls. But damage output is poor. Still a small niche with Trick + U-Turn + Frisk (noivern also gets).

So what about these buffs? No much needed stat buffs unfortunately, but 2 moveset expansions.
1.	Agility
A bit strange that it is only added now, seems like a perfect candidate, and it is now its evolution move, a move that defines the pokemon! But how useful is this? Well it is usually used by powerful Pokemon to boost their speed for a sweep. Furret definitely cannot do this, but it does learn Baton Pass, allowing it to increase the speed then pass this on. Is this useful? Sort of, but there are much better Baton Passers of speed, mainly speed boosters like Scolipede and Ninjask. And in Smogon tiers Baton Pass is banned any way so it really isn’t the biggest boost in the world

2.	Coil
This is really cool, I love this set up move. And Furret does not have great ways to boost its attack already. Furret would need a few boosts before its damage output is good, but it might be able to get this combined with the defense boost, maybe with a Rest/Talk set?. It doesn’t have many inaccurate attacks to benefit. It does however have Amnesia so it can boost up SpD and Def while increasing its power which is pretty cool. Combine that with Baton Pass as in the previous example and you have a unique BP package. Increasing the bulk, power and accuracy of your sweeper, and ideally getting multiple boosts before needing to BP. Again, no BP in smogon, but this is another option for Furret.

So where does this leave Furret? Really, the scout set is still the most viable in smogon, but if you really want to use Furret, maybe try a BP set in battle spot singles and wait until it gets the stat boost or evolution or mega evolution or huge buff that it really deserves!