Liepard
Cruel Pokémon
Their beautiful form comes from the muscles they have developed. They run silently in the night.
Base Stats
Type Effectiveness
Abilities
Evolution Chain
Moves
Locations
Details
Sprites
Competitive
Strategy Overview
Prankster is one of the best abilities in the game, and Liepard can capitalize on it by using support moves such as Encore, Thunder Wave, and Rain Dance or Sunny Day to help its teammates. The threat of Encore alone can prevent the opponent's sweepers from setting up early in the match, while Thunder Wave provides a good catch-all response to sweepers that have already set up or faster threats like Floatzel in general. Meanwhile, this same ability also makes Liepard the face of many weather teams in NU, guaranteeing that at least one sweeper on their team will get a chance to shine regardless of the circumstances. STAB Knock Off, Sucker Punch, and Pursuit are also powerful tools that Liepard can use to cripple the opponent's Pokemon and inflict good damage. Liepard can even become a decent late-game sweeper itself with Nasty Plot, Dark Pulse, and Copycat, bypassing other priority attackers such as Shiftry and Samurott to become a unique threat. However, Liepard is extremely frail and shouldn't switch into anything other than obvious Psychic-type attacks; even then, Liepard risks being OHKOed by a stray Signal Beam from many Psychic-type Pokemon. It also lacks the raw power to break past bulky foes, limiting its effectiveness as an all-out attacker, and it struggles to fit all of the tools it wants on the same moveset. These factors make Liepard highly reliant both on good prediction when dealing with most foes to avoid being KOed and make the most of its opportunities to support its teammates and on good teambuilding to compensate for the moves it chooses not to run.
Common Teammates
Competitive data from Smogon University via data.pkmn.cc