Yep, a monster, but both Ash and Paul have stronger mons than it. Also even Ash's Torkoal (who was jobber back in AG) gave a good fight against one of Brandon's Legendary Titans so it's not that they were invincible.
Yep I rewatched Alain's battles and still haven't seen anything from him that indicates that he's on par or better than Paul when it comes to battling skill and planning ahead.I'd place Alain in the Tyson/Virgil/Harrison category in terms of skilled trainers.Yeah Alain won at a league but so have Tyson and Virgil and they weren't all that impressive in terms of skill,they won more so because of the power and overall balance of their team,with Alain his team is decent but most of the power comes from his Charizard.
Yeah Alain is definitely more skilled than Harrison, Tyson and Virgil. Here are his skill feats:
Actually in Darkrai’s case Bad Dreams is visually depicted to be affecting Sceptile understood by the scene where Sceptile is in the darkness while asleep before Ash calls out to him (this is distinct from the DE animation). Heracross was KOed before an iteration of bad dreams could occur. Huh... that’s kind of annoying that they don’t mention Tough Claws for MC-X especially since they mention Mega Launcher for Mega Blastoise, Thick Fat for Mega Venasaur and Drought for Mega Charizard Y. Eh I’m just going to use default expection and say MC-X had Tough Claws since abilities are unique for Megas and this isn’t a gen where abilities weren’t a thing. Anyways removing that doesn’t detract from my assessment of Alain’s skill at all since Tough Claws just augments the power of contact moves. Sandstream on the other hand definitely shows Alain’s skill in particular he sent out Tyranitar first and also had Bisharp + Metagross both of whom wouldn’t be affected by the weather variant of Sandstorm in the case that Sandstorm were still active after Tyranitar’s defeat.
Yeah Gary is absolute fodder compared to Alain (would get eviscerated by MC-X 6-0) and even Paul would make him his b*tch when using his best team. The rest of Alain’s team gets grossly underestimated especially Tyranitar and Metagross because people don’t factor in that Tyranitar and Metagross lost to the strongest variant of Pikachu till date (supported both by scaling from Alain’s Base Charizard as well as Pikachu’s contributions to beating Lysandre’s MRG just a few hours later, and by the narrative of if there were ever a time for Pikachu to battle with full cumulative expereince, it would be during a league final). Metagross in particular given how well it did against Peakachu would be stronger than any of Paul’s Pokémon except debatably Motordrive Electivire.
Agreed. Alain wasn't the main rival like Gary and Paul, Sawyer was. People just can't get over the fact that Ash won most of the time against Sawyer, which for some reason makes people think he wasn't the true rival. He was the true rival, it's just that for once he had the upper hand in the rivalry, which is fine.
I’m going to be frank; if the rest of Tobias’s Pokémon are on par with Darkrai/Latios (this is a high ball since there’s a fairly good argument for why Darkrai was Tobi’s Ace and hence none of his other Pokémon were stronger than it), then it's highly doubtful that Tobias can beat Alain. Tobias’s Darkrai and Latios scale to being in the E4 Base Ace spectrum (and even then most likely not on the upper end of it where the likes of Flint’s Infernape and Caitlin’s Gothitelle reside) whereas Alain’s Mega Charizard X is the strongest trainer Pokémon in existence barring Champion Mega Aces (and debatably Lysandre’s MRG) a.k.a is definitively above the E4 Mega Ace spectrum (if anyone doesn’t know about my justifications for these claims, feel free to ask). I can’t understate just how drastically above Darkrai and Latios MC-X would be; MC-X could literally take on an entire team of legendaries of that ilk and have a non-trivial possibility of winning. On average (when factoring in stamina drain) MC-X should be able to take out around 5 legendaries and then loose to the 6th from which point Metagross (and Bisharp if needed) can finish the job.
