u/zellisgoatbond

Hi all, for the last month or so I've been playing some variation of Raging Bolt, and locally we've had quite a few Beedrill players pop up - it's a rough matchup for me in general, but one of the most frustrating things personally is that initially it feels like a matchup where you don't have much agency over what happens throughout the game. In other words, if they get to establish multiple Beedrill, you don't really have much you can do about that. However much like any other matchup there has to be useful counterplay, so I wanted to get some advice over what's important in that matchup. In particular a few things come to mind...

• Early game retreat lock can be impactful if they bench a liability [most commonly fezandipiti or fan rotom], but this doesn't feel like a particularly reliable gameplan since beedrill often only really uses fan rotom as a bailout plan if the start is otherwise slow.
• I run bolt slop with hero's cape, so Hero's Cape on Kangaskhan early on could be really impactful since that would require 4 Beedrill online to KO it, at which point Red Card really disrupts them because they don't have the bench space for too much draw. Alternatively Hero's Cape on Bolt slightly later can set up situations where they need to find gust, but setting up Bolt inherently requires you to bring out a bunch of 2 prize liabilities which are far easier to KO.
• I suppose Koraidon ex could be useful as well? It's not one shotting a Beedrill, but 230HP means that they need 3 Beedrill on board to one shot it, so Orichalcum fang can set up some lines to bring in another attacker, or maybe even look for Wellspring lines to force situations where my opponent can't safely bench more dunsparces later on.

With the election results done and dusted now, one of the first orders of business for the new parliament will be to elect a new Presiding Officer. Alison Johnstone didn't run again this time around, so there'll be someone brand new in the office this time. In particular, a few interesting things to note...

• Up until now, the role has always alternated between pro-independence and anti-independence MSPs. On that basis if that were to continue, the next presiding officer would likely be from Labour, Reform, the Tories or the Lib Dems.
• But since Labour and Reform are tied for second, it's unlikely that either party would be willing to "lose" a seat and break that tie. [Also I believe all of Reform's MSPs are first-timers, so not really in the running for the office in the first place]
• We've not had a constituency MSP becoming Presiding Officer in a wee bit - Ken Macintosh and Alison Johnstone were both list MSPs.

If I had to take a complete punt, I wouldn't be surprised to see Liam McArthur go for it this time - he's been deputy in the last term, a Lib Dem taking the post doesn't really alter any parliamentary arithmetic, he was generally highly praised for the way he conducted the debate and campaign around the assisted dying bill [but perhaps maybe wants some time out of the limelight in terms of actively getting involved in legislation], and while he's a constituency MSP he enjoys a lot of personal popularity [he got something like 70% of the vote in Orkney, which I believe is the largest share anyone's ever got at Holyrood], but it seems unlikely that he'd run again in 2031. I'm not really sure that one of the other Tories could get the backing of enough of the rest of Parliament in the same way