Anonymous asks:

A common problem of turn-delayed moves (things like Fly, Bounce, Dive, Dig) is that they’re too predictable. I wonder, would that remain so if these moves had variants whith different typing? Things like Secret Blade (steel dig), Vine Trap (grass dig), Burning Dive (fire fly) meteor drop (dragon fly), etc, whith identical preparatory turn but different execution. Also, do you think such additions would be justifiable fluff-wise? And what would it say of a pokemon to be specialized in such moves?

So, if I’m understanding this right, the idea would be that the move looks exactly the same on the first turn?  Fly and, say, Meteor Dive or whatever we call it both give the message “the Pokémon flew up high”?  I think that does help a lot, at least for Pokémon that can learn multiple versions of the same move.  You can’t see “the Pokémon dug underground” and just say “HAHA I’ll switch in a Flying Pokémon and their attack will do nothing!” because it might turn out that your opponent is actually using, like, Stalagmite Crush or something.  I think you’d probably find that there are a lot of Pokémon for whom it wouldn’t be possible to justify including two versions of the same move (like, clearly you can’t give a Fire-type Fly variant to Delibird) but in most cases it’s probably no crazier than a typical Pokémon movepool (I mean, Pidgeot already gets Heat Wave).  You don’t even need to teach a Pokémon more than one of these moves to get the benefit, because it’s the possibility that you might have that deters the opponent from trying to exploit the delayed attack.  Adds a whole new dimension of bluffing and mind games.  Of course, you still get royally screwed over by Protect, but I think that’s sort of fine; this addresses what is probably the most important reason that Fly, Dig et al. don’t get used.

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