Through the Looking Glasses: Using Safety Goggles

Pokémon X and Y brought us a litany of new tools to play around with when creating new teams. With new Pokémon, moves, and abilities drawing the most attention, the new items introduced to us in this generation have fallen to the wayside. These new items bring some unique effects to the table and are still plenty unexplored and underused. My personal favorite of the newly-introduced items is Safety Goggles. Even if you have played through the main story of X and Y extensively, you could have very easily missed the Safety Goggles.

The in-game description of Safety Goggles reads “These goggles protect the holder from both weather-related damage and powder.” This more or less grants the holder the effects of the newly buffed Overcoat ability. This gives your Pokémon an immunity to the passive damage dealt by Sandstorm and Hail, grants it an immunity to the various status-inducing powders (such as Sleep Powder and Spore), and most importantly allow your Pokémon to ignore Rage Powders.

Right now, VGC ’14 has a couple of very potent threats that can be mitigated by Safety Goggles. If you’ve followed the Video Game Championships at all in the past few years, you’ve noticed that Amoonguss has been an absolute terror since it was introduced into the game. The mushroom’s natural bulk combined with access to both Spore and Rage Powder has made it a VGC mainstay and one of the biggest annoyances in the game. Another relatively new threat this year is Venusaur. With access to Sleep Powder and its Hidden Ability Chlorophyll combined with Mega Charizard-Y’s Drought, Venusaur has turned into a very dangerous sleep abuser. Both Amoonguss and Venusaur have seen extensive usage in the developing metagame, but a well-placed pair of Safety Goggles can slow them down.

Pokémon that I’ve Stuck Goggles On:

Rotom-H is one of the best users of Safety Goggles, especially because it can tilt the sun matchup in its favor. When pitted against the Venusaur / Mega Charizard-Y combination, the Safety Goggles allow Rotom-H to ignore Venusaur’s lightning-fast Sleep Powders and fire off Thunderbolts into Mega Charizard-Y while resisting almost everything that the duo can throw out at it. More often than not, you’ll be able to take down a Pokémon or two or at least threaten the team without having to fear that Rotom-H will fall asleep.

Scizor is an interesting Pokémon to use Safety Goggles with. While Scizor doesn’t deal with Sun like Rotom-H does, it utilizes the Goggles in another manner. Amoongus’ Rage Powder is a vital tool that many teams use to preserve things like Mega Kangaskhan or Mega Tyranitar. A Scizor with Safety Goggles can help play against these sorts of teams because the Goggles ignore the effects of Rage Powder. Mega Tyranitar is no longer safe to Dragon Dance with Amoongus’ protection, and it will not be able to put Scizor to sleep. Amoongus’ role on these particular sorts of teams is weakened greatly by Safety Goggles Scizor. There have been more times than I can count where an opponent assumes that their low health Pokémon are safe next to Amoongus, only for it to go down before they know it.

Why you should consider Goggles

Safety Goggles give a Pokémon an additional role that it wouldn’t normally have. The Goggles help transform Pokémon that are ordinarily not seen as Grass counters into full-fledged hard counters. We’ve seen how powerful Spore is in the metagame and this niche item is the perfect answer for it.

Next time you’re building a team and are struggling with Amoongus or Venusaur, don’t hesitate to try on some Safety Goggles and experiment. Who knows, maybe Safety Goggles are just what you need to complete your ensemble.