So I know no one wants to give away their trade secrets, but for those of us who are in training, what sort of teams could we expect to come up against? We've all heard the stories of watching flying articunos and what not, but whats the real heat? Any tips? The stories from last year are amazing BTW, congrats to everyone

well... to all beginners, make sure you have a Garchomp counter no matter what. Garchomp is a huge threat at VGC.

mudkip: not this year. The Ubers are the biggest threats, but they also create more diversity/make it easier to use certain teams.

The teams I've come up with this year: Rain (several different variants of it, I made a final version of it a few weeks ago), TR/Rain, and my latest idea, TR/Hail (which has worked well in the limited testing I did with it)

My opinion on the way to do it, fill up a box with viable Pokemon then start screwing around and play alot of games, like alot, until you decide what you like

currently I'm in the lead testing phase trying lots of lead combinations till I pick one

What pimp and drco said. Weather will be running rampant in this years VGC. I have been seeing a couple Japanese players use a sort of weather switching combo used to screw up which ever weather inducers you lead with, Its pretty fun in my experience testing it. The best option for testing is PBR if you have access to it.

Just make sure you can take on the ubers really. The other two Pokémon you'll usually find are just there for good synergy. So like Toxicroak & Kyogre, or Groudon and Cherrim, or Kyogre and Ludicolo, or mewtwo and abomasnow. ETC

Having some way to counter Kyogre is a must. If you're not prepared to deal massive damage to it, it'll tear you apart with Water Spout. As a rough guess, I'd say that more than half of VGC teams use him. Grass Knot and Low Kick do wonders against Kyogre because of its massive weight. They also deal a fair chunk of damage to other heavy Ubers.

And to second what DragonFE said, PBR wi-fi is great. Some days every other team I run into is a Japanese VGC team. You sometimes score Friend Passes from your opponents as well, allowing you to look into their teams with greater depth.

Groudon + Cherrim

When you have that, groudon's low SpDef becomes higher, and so his atack, wich is an important stat.

Well sometning to beat ubers with. as you may know, alot of legends are dragons and allot more. So i reccomend this pokemon:lapras: here are the moves you should want to have

Lapras: TBolt for Kyogre etc
Ice Beam for dragons.
Surf for any other
and Pyschic for any other pokemon of any weakness of pyschic.

Purple, wouldnt Starmie with those moves be prefered? or is STAB worth the drop in speed? (and power it think? database is giving me errors)