Clefable, the surprise defender

In the current gym battle meta an attacker is likely to line up machamps and burn right through the gym.

The main reason is that machamp is SE against blissey, snorlax, chansey, tyranitar, steelix and lapras.

Seen any of those in a gym lately?


How to hurt an attacker when it looks like this?


If you arrive alone at a gym you're limited to dropping something inside and have to rely on what's already there. Well, unless you're the player tearing the gym down, in which case you'll probably drop a blissey or snorlax inside to give fellow team members a little extra time to fill the gym up.


If you're a party then it's time to design the gym. Most definitely so of you're four or more players.

The trick is to mix up the typing, which is why a dragonite or gyardos no longer is a total waste of defensive space when placed between one of the big three, blissey, snorlax and chansey.


And then there is the surprise defender.

Clefable.

It has a semi decent bulk which is further increased by the fact that basically no attacker will go to the lengths of digging up a poison or steel type attacker. Thus clefable should only see neutral incoming damage.

With access to the same defensive moveset as blissey, Zen Headbutt and Dazzling Gleam, funny things happen should an unwary attacker throw a cursory glance at the pink defender and go to work with a machamp.

Fighting type attacks are ineffective versus fairy type pokemon, basically adding bulk to clefable to the degree that it almost stands side by side with snorlax should the attacker commit this mistake.

To add insult to injury clefable comes with almost 50 percent more attack compared to blissey, which means that Zen Headbutt will hit a lot harder. Add STAB on top of that to Dazzling Gleam and you can expect an attacking machamp to be utterly destroyed by the first charge attack.


Even when your trick is detected you'll still force the attacker to switch pokemon back and forth between machamp and a gym sweeper of some kind.

Should that sweeper be a dragonite then it'll meet almost the same fate as machamp since dragon type attacks are ineffective against fairy type pokemon and fairy type attacks are SE against dragon type pokemon. Zen Headbutt does neutral damage to dragonite though.

And here comes the killer.

The same goes for tyranitar as well. While it'll take next to no damage from Zen Headbutt tyranitar's dark type attacks are ineffective against fairy type pokemon, and when that Dazzling Gleam goes off funny things happen to the health bar of the attacker since fairy type attacks are SE against dark type pokemon.


Raikou, groudon and kyogre should move through your clefable more easily, and the same goes for mewtwo for those lucky enough to have one. Still, most players won't have one of those in their gym raiding lineup.