Introduction
If you don't know, the Muks 4BL challenge is simple. Climb from 1500 to 1800 elo on the gen3ou ladder using one team with four BL or lower ranked mons for a cash reward. Provide a string of replays as proof. Hclat won the challenge quickly, but he offered the money to anybody else who could win provided they didn't use any of the mons he did. He proceeded to reach 1800 three more times, banning 24 mons in total.
Here are Hclat's teams that won (and therefore also a list of banned mons):
After hclat's first win, I made a mixed offense that peaked at 1780. I made a detailed post about it here. I took some time off after that, but I got interested again after seeing hclat win with these wacky teams. I ended up dedicating almost all of my mons time exclusively to this challenge for the first six months of the year.
In May, Johnald ended up winning the challenge. He used the following 6:
The money was no longer available, but I wanted to see the challenge through, so I continued attempts. I made 11 teams total that successfully climbed from 1500 to 1700, 5 that exceeded 1750, and one that reached 1797, but I was never able to make it over the hump. Nonetheless, I've probably spent more time on this challenge than the rest of the community combined, so I wanted to make a post sharing my experiences. Hopefully you'll learn something or find something I say to be interesting.
As an aside, Muks also offered money to anyone able to go from 1500 to 1900 with three BLs. Hclat won this with his first team, but he's still offering to pass the money on to anyone else who can do it. Only the first six mons are banned for that challenge, so I think it's much easier. I'm including a BL viability ranking in this post as well as analysis of a bunch of team structures I tried, so this post may help you with that challenge if you so desire.
Motivation
Why spend so much time on the 4BL challenge? Well, there are a lot of reasons. For one, I respect ladder play. As wacky as ladder can be, I think there are enough good players there and enough people using good teams that any team able to reach 1800 (which for 2025 means about rank 2-6) is a good team.
Another reason is that I don't play tours. There are several reasons for that. For one, I never have to deal with scheduling issues which are seriously annoying. Another reason is that opponent-specific prep is an aspect of mons that doesn't interest me much. I've always seen myself as more of a teambuilder than a competitor; as such, I care more about general metagame trends than zeroing in on opponent tendencies. On the whole, I find ladder to be adequate competition for my purposes, even though I have an eerie feeling that the quality of ladder has decreased significantly in recent years. That's a different topic for a different post, though. Another reason I don't play tours, being honest, is my fear of underperforming expectations - both those I've set on myself and those of the community on me. That's not a good reason not to compete, but I didn't say my reasons were good. I only said I had reasons.
Anyway, I don't play tours, but I ladder quite a bit. I viewed the 4BL challenge as a way to prove my competitive worth to both myself and the community without entering a tour. Another reason I wanted to do the challenge was boredom. I'd gotten tired of the same old ADV OU. Finally, I just found the concept of teambuilding restrictions to be fascinating, and the more I failed, the more I wanted to finally find a combination that worked. These reasons are what kept me going for six whole months.
The 4BL Problem
Most experienced ADV builders have built good teams with BLs before. Nearly every fully evolved mon has some sort of irreplicable niche, save for extremely rare cases like Typhlosion being completely outdone by Charizard. Lots of BLs fulfill roles that OU mons can't - this is what makes building with BLs worth it. OUs separate themselves from the pack by fulfulling many roles simultaneously (e.g. tyranitar, metagross, zapdos), excelling in one or two extremely high-value roles (e.g. skarmory, aerodactyl, claydol, swampert), or some combination thereof. BLs bring neither of these qualities. Naturally, most of the best teams use six OU mons. By slotting a BL over an OU, you are either sacrificing top-tier role compression or the best of the best at fulfilling the most important roles. This is okay, though. Teammates can make up for a BL mon's weaknesses while bringing out its strengths. For example, the core of skarmory + blissey + dugtrio + milotic + claydol is defensively resilient against nearly every strategy in the tier, but it's helpless against snorlax with any sort of anti-spikes support. Basically any mon that beats snorlax, then, no matter how many terrible matchups it has, can be thrown onto that team and it will perform well on ladder.
As one stacks BLs onto a team, it becomes more and more difficult to compensate for their flaws because there are fewer slots available for the high value that OU mons provide. This principle is obvious and needs no explanation. Without trying the challenge yourself, though, I don't think it's possible to truly appreciate just how stringent the 4BL restriction is. I'm going to attempt to illustrate the 4BL problem as well as I can in this section.
Below, I've included a small compendium of what I believe to be the twelve most important roles in the ADV OU metagame and the mons, both OU and BL, that fulfill these roles. Every good team fulfills most, if not all, of these roles with at least one member. Note that teambuilding is much more than just completing this checklist. A good team fulfills these roles with six mons and sets that form a cohesive offensive game plan. This game plan necessarily includes not only long term strategic goals (e.g. spike -> break -> clean or trap/boom to remove walls -> sweep) but also tactical synergies between mons that can be used to manipulate the board to advantageous positions (e.g. zapdos draws in blissey with the threat of a strong tbolt and BP's out to a fighter). It is possible, easy in fact, to make a team of 6 OUs that fulfills nearly all of these 12 roles but still cannot reach 1800 on ladder.
Fulfilling these roles is still an important part of teambuilding, though, so this compendium should provide a good picture of the difficulty of this challenge to someone who hasn't thought about it before. I've separated the mons fulfilling each role by OU and BL tiering categorization, and further by mons Hclat and Johnald won the challenge with and subsequently banned. Banned mons are listed first, then legal ones. Note that this isn't exhaustive. There are probably more viable BLs that I've forgotten or overlooked.
Defensive Roles:
1. Sand immune ttar/aero answer
Offensive Roles:
6. Immediate speed/revenge killers/cleaners/win conditions
Spikes War Roles:
10. Spikers
Note: I have mostly left stat passers, leech seed mons, sleep setters, endeavor users, etc. off of this list because, while I consider those to be valuable assets in the builder, I don't see them as core parts of the metagame. This list also doesn't address status absorption, which is extremely important for every team but difficult to describe well with this format.
With each and every ban, the difficulty in putting together a viable 6 increases. To illustrate this, I highlight the "ground immune" category. Spikes are the most central aspect of this tier, so being immune to spikes is a huge asset. 99% of good OU teams use at least one ground immune. Each of the five teams that completed this challenge used at least one ground-immune. The BL ground-immunes, for the most part, are horrible. Four of the five successful teams turned to OU for theirs. As far as I'm concerned, the only splashable ones are dragonite and weezing, and they're not exactly considered consistent. Ground immunity, however, typically doesn't overlap with many other roles even among OUs. Gengar and aerodactyl, for example, are considered top threats in OU, but they don't fulfill any of the other primary defensive roles, and they don't even check fighting types well. If you want to use an unbanned ground immune, you're screwed both ways. You either have to expend an OU slot on a mon that doesn't provide much utility or you have to use a BL that really struggles to keep up in the tier at all.
As a more concise visual aid, I've made a rough viability ranking of the BLs in light of how many of these roles they fulfill, how well they fulfill them, and how important the role that they fill is. For example, magnemite only has one role, but it excels at it, and trapping skarm is amazing support for a lot of viable mons, so I rank it in A-tier. I didn't put too much thought into these rankings, so take them with a grain of salt, but I consider everything A-minus tier and above to be genuinely good and relatively easy to use for this challenge. Well, other than smeargle at least. I'm not sure about the beagle because I never really used it. Most of my glalie spikes offenses didn't work for reasons I'll discuss later, and I think smeargle would only amplify those issues. Sleep and stat pass are powerful assets, though, so I'm sure somebody could make it work which is why it's in A+.
On the topic of stat pass, I've left the other BL stat passers & speed pass recipients off of my tiering list because I don't know how to build consistent stat pass teams.
The main reason I did this VR is to illustrate just how devasting the ban lists are for this challenge. You'll notice immediately that 4/6 of the S-tiers were used up by Hclat and Johnald. 18 of the 35 BL's A-minus tier and above are under either the Hclat or Johnald ban hammer. That's over half of them. I cannot stress enough how much of a strain this puts on the teambuilder.
There's one more layer of difficulty I wish to discuss here. Over time, as one plays and builds in a metagame, he develops a library of concepts that speed up the teambuilding process. As an extremely basic example, if I notice a tyranitar and dd mence weakness on my team, I might add a swampert. Swampert beats nearly every tar set, and it beats all DD mence. That's great, but a lot of mons do that just as well, so why add swampert? One answer is that it also resists metagross's meteor mash while being sand immune and threatening to block explosion with protect. Another answer is that it checks physical mons reliably while also threatening anywhere from 35% damage to straight up OHKO's on basically the entire tier. Another answer is that swampert has a great special defense stat, so it can afford to switch into mixed versions of these mons before they've revealed their sets. BL alternatives like quagsire and donphan don't have all these traits. I've added swampert to address one particular issue on my team, but what has happened in reality is the full swampert package has automatically fixed a bunch of issues my team had without me even realizing it. When forced to use a bunch of BLs, you're starting from square one again. Each new team faces the same set of problems - it has to address the same threat list and beat the same common archetypes as any other ADV OU team. But the tools you've become accustomed to using for this task aren't available to you any more, and the ones you're stuck with don't work as well. It's on you to dissect the reasons why your tools don't work and come up with new combinations that are effective. I'm an ADV main, but I have experience studying and learning DPP OU, and I'm not kidding when I say the 4BL experience was similar. It's akin to learning a completely new metagame, but there are no sample teams or youtube guides for it. You're on your own with nothing but the ghost of hclat's dugless jynx how-the-fuck-does-this-actually-win mixed offense as a guide.
This challenge, with all the bans, is absolutely brutal - probably just as difficult as placing top 16 in invitational or going positive in SPL in my mind (although it tests different skills). I hope I've described it well and highlighted just how impressive Johnald's and especially Hclat's accomplishments are.
By June, I had become pretty comfortable with the 4BL meta. The ladder this summer doesn't feel as active as it did earlier in the year, so one loss in the 1700s really would set me back a lot. To offset this, I started doing multiple runs at the same time with two separate teams so that a loss on one account wouldn't negate all my progress. The mere fact that I could build and play two viable teams concurrently shows the amount of progress I made between January and June. About midway through, I started to seek advantages not only in the builder, but also in my play. I finally realized that with four BLs on my team, I'd be disadvantaged in the builder every single game and I'd have to make up for that with pristine play. I can't say that I fully delivered, but I started considering in-game aspects I hadn't really thought of before, or at least placing higher emphasis on them, and that helped me a lot, but I won't get into details for this post. A lot of mons discourse centers around teambuilding, which is my favorite part of this game, but we don't talk enough about how to make winning plays in my opinion.
Teams
For this last section I'm going to share the main archetypes I tried. I'll share exact pastes of all the teams that crossed the 1700 mark, but the rest will just be pictures of the six mons. I have approximate dates of when I tested some of these teams. I'm including 44 teams, but that's not even everything I tried. I wasn't systematic enough
while building to track all that. This is a general picture of the builds I was working on with some specific combinations or sets I discovered and felt were worth discussing. Note that most of my time in this challenge was spent under the Hclat bans, not the Johnald ones, so some teams presented here use members of Johnald's winning team. It didn't end up mattering too much in the end because I was using team styles that didn't need the mons he used.
1. Aero spikes offense
2. Spikes offense without aero
What made me want to build it:
3. Moltres spikes
4. Spikes stall
5. Trapper teams with bulky wincons
6. Fighter balance
7. Spikeless weather clear offense with reversal/flail sweepers
8. Spikeless suicune mixed offense
What made me want to build it:
Conclusion
Anybody who interacted with me during these last six months knows how much stress the 4BL challenge put on me and how badly I wanted to succeed. I didn't in the end, even though three of my runs were basically good enough. I can't say I always approached the challenge in a constructive way or that it was a wholly worthwhile use of my time, but I can say with certainty that it made me a much better builder and player. Having to do more with less forced me to go back to the fundamentals, reexamine what I knew about the game, unlearn bad habits, and stop crutching on certain mons/patterns I'd become accustomed to. If your goal is to win the next big ADV tournament, I don't think this challenge is a great way to prepare for that. As I said before, you're essentially learning a different metagame. However, if you want to try something new and you don't have anything specific to prepare for, I absolutely recommend restrictive teambuilding challenges like this. If you take it seriously, you will improve.
I want to thank the following people:
If you don't know, the Muks 4BL challenge is simple. Climb from 1500 to 1800 elo on the gen3ou ladder using one team with four BL or lower ranked mons for a cash reward. Provide a string of replays as proof. Hclat won the challenge quickly, but he offered the money to anybody else who could win provided they didn't use any of the mons he did. He proceeded to reach 1800 three more times, banning 24 mons in total.
Here are Hclat's teams that won (and therefore also a list of banned mons):
After hclat's first win, I made a mixed offense that peaked at 1780. I made a detailed post about it here. I took some time off after that, but I got interested again after seeing hclat win with these wacky teams. I ended up dedicating almost all of my mons time exclusively to this challenge for the first six months of the year.
In May, Johnald ended up winning the challenge. He used the following 6:
The money was no longer available, but I wanted to see the challenge through, so I continued attempts. I made 11 teams total that successfully climbed from 1500 to 1700, 5 that exceeded 1750, and one that reached 1797, but I was never able to make it over the hump. Nonetheless, I've probably spent more time on this challenge than the rest of the community combined, so I wanted to make a post sharing my experiences. Hopefully you'll learn something or find something I say to be interesting.
As an aside, Muks also offered money to anyone able to go from 1500 to 1900 with three BLs. Hclat won this with his first team, but he's still offering to pass the money on to anyone else who can do it. Only the first six mons are banned for that challenge, so I think it's much easier. I'm including a BL viability ranking in this post as well as analysis of a bunch of team structures I tried, so this post may help you with that challenge if you so desire.
Motivation
Why spend so much time on the 4BL challenge? Well, there are a lot of reasons. For one, I respect ladder play. As wacky as ladder can be, I think there are enough good players there and enough people using good teams that any team able to reach 1800 (which for 2025 means about rank 2-6) is a good team.
Another reason is that I don't play tours. There are several reasons for that. For one, I never have to deal with scheduling issues which are seriously annoying. Another reason is that opponent-specific prep is an aspect of mons that doesn't interest me much. I've always seen myself as more of a teambuilder than a competitor; as such, I care more about general metagame trends than zeroing in on opponent tendencies. On the whole, I find ladder to be adequate competition for my purposes, even though I have an eerie feeling that the quality of ladder has decreased significantly in recent years. That's a different topic for a different post, though. Another reason I don't play tours, being honest, is my fear of underperforming expectations - both those I've set on myself and those of the community on me. That's not a good reason not to compete, but I didn't say my reasons were good. I only said I had reasons.
Anyway, I don't play tours, but I ladder quite a bit. I viewed the 4BL challenge as a way to prove my competitive worth to both myself and the community without entering a tour. Another reason I wanted to do the challenge was boredom. I'd gotten tired of the same old ADV OU. Finally, I just found the concept of teambuilding restrictions to be fascinating, and the more I failed, the more I wanted to finally find a combination that worked. These reasons are what kept me going for six whole months.
The 4BL Problem
Most experienced ADV builders have built good teams with BLs before. Nearly every fully evolved mon has some sort of irreplicable niche, save for extremely rare cases like Typhlosion being completely outdone by Charizard. Lots of BLs fulfill roles that OU mons can't - this is what makes building with BLs worth it. OUs separate themselves from the pack by fulfulling many roles simultaneously (e.g. tyranitar, metagross, zapdos), excelling in one or two extremely high-value roles (e.g. skarmory, aerodactyl, claydol, swampert), or some combination thereof. BLs bring neither of these qualities. Naturally, most of the best teams use six OU mons. By slotting a BL over an OU, you are either sacrificing top-tier role compression or the best of the best at fulfilling the most important roles. This is okay, though. Teammates can make up for a BL mon's weaknesses while bringing out its strengths. For example, the core of skarmory + blissey + dugtrio + milotic + claydol is defensively resilient against nearly every strategy in the tier, but it's helpless against snorlax with any sort of anti-spikes support. Basically any mon that beats snorlax, then, no matter how many terrible matchups it has, can be thrown onto that team and it will perform well on ladder.
As one stacks BLs onto a team, it becomes more and more difficult to compensate for their flaws because there are fewer slots available for the high value that OU mons provide. This principle is obvious and needs no explanation. Without trying the challenge yourself, though, I don't think it's possible to truly appreciate just how stringent the 4BL restriction is. I'm going to attempt to illustrate the 4BL problem as well as I can in this section.
Below, I've included a small compendium of what I believe to be the twelve most important roles in the ADV OU metagame and the mons, both OU and BL, that fulfill these roles. Every good team fulfills most, if not all, of these roles with at least one member. Note that teambuilding is much more than just completing this checklist. A good team fulfills these roles with six mons and sets that form a cohesive offensive game plan. This game plan necessarily includes not only long term strategic goals (e.g. spike -> break -> clean or trap/boom to remove walls -> sweep) but also tactical synergies between mons that can be used to manipulate the board to advantageous positions (e.g. zapdos draws in blissey with the threat of a strong tbolt and BP's out to a fighter). It is possible, easy in fact, to make a team of 6 OUs that fulfills nearly all of these 12 roles but still cannot reach 1800 on ladder.
Fulfilling these roles is still an important part of teambuilding, though, so this compendium should provide a good picture of the difficulty of this challenge to someone who hasn't thought about it before. I've separated the mons fulfilling each role by OU and BL tiering categorization, and further by mons Hclat and Johnald won the challenge with and subsequently banned. Banned mons are listed first, then legal ones. Note that this isn't exhaustive. There are probably more viable BLs that I've forgotten or overlooked.
Defensive Roles:
1. Sand immune ttar/aero answer
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Offensive Roles:
6. Immediate speed/revenge killers/cleaners/win conditions
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Spikes War Roles:
10. Spikers
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Note: I have mostly left stat passers, leech seed mons, sleep setters, endeavor users, etc. off of this list because, while I consider those to be valuable assets in the builder, I don't see them as core parts of the metagame. This list also doesn't address status absorption, which is extremely important for every team but difficult to describe well with this format.
With each and every ban, the difficulty in putting together a viable 6 increases. To illustrate this, I highlight the "ground immune" category. Spikes are the most central aspect of this tier, so being immune to spikes is a huge asset. 99% of good OU teams use at least one ground immune. Each of the five teams that completed this challenge used at least one ground-immune. The BL ground-immunes, for the most part, are horrible. Four of the five successful teams turned to OU for theirs. As far as I'm concerned, the only splashable ones are dragonite and weezing, and they're not exactly considered consistent. Ground immunity, however, typically doesn't overlap with many other roles even among OUs. Gengar and aerodactyl, for example, are considered top threats in OU, but they don't fulfill any of the other primary defensive roles, and they don't even check fighting types well. If you want to use an unbanned ground immune, you're screwed both ways. You either have to expend an OU slot on a mon that doesn't provide much utility or you have to use a BL that really struggles to keep up in the tier at all.
As a more concise visual aid, I've made a rough viability ranking of the BLs in light of how many of these roles they fulfill, how well they fulfill them, and how important the role that they fill is. For example, magnemite only has one role, but it excels at it, and trapping skarm is amazing support for a lot of viable mons, so I rank it in A-tier. I didn't put too much thought into these rankings, so take them with a grain of salt, but I consider everything A-minus tier and above to be genuinely good and relatively easy to use for this challenge. Well, other than smeargle at least. I'm not sure about the beagle because I never really used it. Most of my glalie spikes offenses didn't work for reasons I'll discuss later, and I think smeargle would only amplify those issues. Sleep and stat pass are powerful assets, though, so I'm sure somebody could make it work which is why it's in A+.
On the topic of stat pass, I've left the other BL stat passers & speed pass recipients off of my tiering list because I don't know how to build consistent stat pass teams.
The main reason I did this VR is to illustrate just how devasting the ban lists are for this challenge. You'll notice immediately that 4/6 of the S-tiers were used up by Hclat and Johnald. 18 of the 35 BL's A-minus tier and above are under either the Hclat or Johnald ban hammer. That's over half of them. I cannot stress enough how much of a strain this puts on the teambuilder.
There's one more layer of difficulty I wish to discuss here. Over time, as one plays and builds in a metagame, he develops a library of concepts that speed up the teambuilding process. As an extremely basic example, if I notice a tyranitar and dd mence weakness on my team, I might add a swampert. Swampert beats nearly every tar set, and it beats all DD mence. That's great, but a lot of mons do that just as well, so why add swampert? One answer is that it also resists metagross's meteor mash while being sand immune and threatening to block explosion with protect. Another answer is that it checks physical mons reliably while also threatening anywhere from 35% damage to straight up OHKO's on basically the entire tier. Another answer is that swampert has a great special defense stat, so it can afford to switch into mixed versions of these mons before they've revealed their sets. BL alternatives like quagsire and donphan don't have all these traits. I've added swampert to address one particular issue on my team, but what has happened in reality is the full swampert package has automatically fixed a bunch of issues my team had without me even realizing it. When forced to use a bunch of BLs, you're starting from square one again. Each new team faces the same set of problems - it has to address the same threat list and beat the same common archetypes as any other ADV OU team. But the tools you've become accustomed to using for this task aren't available to you any more, and the ones you're stuck with don't work as well. It's on you to dissect the reasons why your tools don't work and come up with new combinations that are effective. I'm an ADV main, but I have experience studying and learning DPP OU, and I'm not kidding when I say the 4BL experience was similar. It's akin to learning a completely new metagame, but there are no sample teams or youtube guides for it. You're on your own with nothing but the ghost of hclat's dugless jynx how-the-fuck-does-this-actually-win mixed offense as a guide.
This challenge, with all the bans, is absolutely brutal - probably just as difficult as placing top 16 in invitational or going positive in SPL in my mind (although it tests different skills). I hope I've described it well and highlighted just how impressive Johnald's and especially Hclat's accomplishments are.
By June, I had become pretty comfortable with the 4BL meta. The ladder this summer doesn't feel as active as it did earlier in the year, so one loss in the 1700s really would set me back a lot. To offset this, I started doing multiple runs at the same time with two separate teams so that a loss on one account wouldn't negate all my progress. The mere fact that I could build and play two viable teams concurrently shows the amount of progress I made between January and June. About midway through, I started to seek advantages not only in the builder, but also in my play. I finally realized that with four BLs on my team, I'd be disadvantaged in the builder every single game and I'd have to make up for that with pristine play. I can't say that I fully delivered, but I started considering in-game aspects I hadn't really thought of before, or at least placing higher emphasis on them, and that helped me a lot, but I won't get into details for this post. A lot of mons discourse centers around teambuilding, which is my favorite part of this game, but we don't talk enough about how to make winning plays in my opinion.
Teams
For this last section I'm going to share the main archetypes I tried. I'll share exact pastes of all the teams that crossed the 1700 mark, but the rest will just be pictures of the six mons. I have approximate dates of when I tested some of these teams. I'm including 44 teams, but that's not even everything I tried. I wasn't systematic enough
while building to track all that. This is a general picture of the builds I was working on with some specific combinations or sets I discovered and felt were worth discussing. Note that most of my time in this challenge was spent under the Hclat bans, not the Johnald ones, so some teams presented here use members of Johnald's winning team. It didn't end up mattering too much in the end because I was using team styles that didn't need the mons he used.
1. Aero spikes offense
- (27 Jan)
- (1732 peak) [paste]
- (20 May)
- aero is the simplest win con in the tier, it combines speed + physical breaking + dug punish
- it looks easy to slot physical attackers that damage skarm/pert/meta/cune (regirock, armaldo, aggron)
- grass types pair well with aero because they pressure spinners and check waters/zap, and there are 2 viable BL grasses
- glalie is a serviceable spiker that adds to the spdef core
- venu + glalie core is not enough to handle zapdos + cune, but lanturn patched it up pretty nicely
- aero offenses really need ttar badly. Sand and offensive pressure are invaluable for beating milo and cune; armaldo can't pressure them at all and even meta/regirock don't do a good enough job on their own
- glalie is an okay spiker, but it struggles spiking at all vs phys off, and it doesn't stick around the way skarm does
- focus punch regirock is not a bad breaker at all
- tect/fp golduck is a decent water. Same offensive properties as offpert but with cune typing and healing in sand.
- I had the most success with boom gar as the extra OU. Notably checks waters, dd mence (on ladder), spinners. Guaranteed value each game
- aero teams are notoriously weak to dd mence and off cune even when using OUs. They also have to be deliberate in pressuring claydol. These BL teams magnify those problems without bringing any upside
- My conclusion was that aero needs either ttar (to beat down waters) or spikes + an insanely bulky team (to outlast waters) and isn't viable for this challenge
- taunt + stabs + double edge sharpedo is actually kinda okay as a breaker for spikes teams that can punish claydol. Can break waters for aero. Don't think it works on these frail teams, though. I tried a version of sharpedo with gar but I can't seem to find it.
- I used cele + aero at some point, but I didn't save any of the offenses I tried. There was a stall I'll mention later
- I think aero + recover giga fire seed cele + bulky mixed golduck + lanturn + regirock + glalie is potentially worth trying because it's as resilient as can be into waters/zap which may offset the lack of tar/sand. I tested this style extensively, though, and it never felt good, so I wouldn't be too hopeful even about that 6.
2. Spikes offense without aero
- (22 Mar) (1708 peak) [paste]
- (02 Apr)
- (14 May)
- (20 May)
What made me want to build it:
- non-aero fast mons/wincons (jolt, gar, agility meta, zard) are able to compress more roles into one slot than aero
- spikes are good, most BL mons don't last very long, so trying any implementation of spikes offense is worth it
- roselia isn't gonna cut it, lol
- offensive donphan is a pretty decent breaker if skarm is chipped or paralyzed
- cb solrock and rain dance mantine seemed somewhat promising as offensive BL ground immunes, but they weren't consistent
- zam spikes make some sense, but it's basically a less immediately strong and even frailer off mie without extra utility. It's really weak to any spikes team, but jolt and aero are particularly difficult for it to face because they effectively limit it to one or two kills max. Agility metagross makes a good partner for this reason because it can sweep frail spikes offenses like this if supported well. Lanturn gets a shout out too because of how well it threatens the standard jolt spikes 6. This is why the other zam spikes teams I tried after the first run used faster mons than it in the form of jolt or agility meta.
- most of the time, these builds were just too defensively flawed or offensively weak to hack it in OU. I never went far with this style. Compare these builds to Kerts 6, the quintessential spikes offense, already considered frail and fishy by many experienced players. It fits three mons over 328 speed; these teams struggle to fit two. It uses both a ghost and a spiker that beats spinners 1v1. These teams barely can fit one of those. Its physical breakers, tar and metagross, both have a lot of defensive applications as well. The same can't be said for the likes of ursaring and CB solrock. OU spikes offenses get to use breakers with defensive utility and also fit gengar. These teams simply don't have the slots for it. Kerts 6 outdoes these teams by a mile, and I'd say an 1800 run with it wouldn't exactly be easy.
- I really expected the last team to do well because it has two wincons (zard + agility meta) that can break down waters for each other and it also has pressure into waters in the form of spikes + defensive answers and booms. It never hit 1700, though. I think this sort of build could work in OU if it fit ttar somewhere because it contributes to the water overload and sand makes all the breakers a lot more threatening.
3. Moltres spikes
- all the ground-immune BLs are terrible, so I looked to OU for solutions
- a lot of BLs simply get stat checked by metagross, so having the pressure in molt is great
- moltres is technically fast enough to serve as the primary revenge killer on more balanced teams, so you can use the other OU slot for more defensive utility instead of having to fit another cleaner
- molt doesn't break most teams very quickly, and it also doesn't get a lot of easy attacking opportunities vs much of the tier. For example, even though it threatens every member of blue offense 1v1, it does not switch in on anything safely for fear of rock slide. Same principle applies to bulkier teams with toxic skarmory, hydro pump pert etc. As such, if it's going to be the main revenge killer, i.e. engine by which offensive matchups are won, it needs to be supported by outstanding defensive mons, and BLs aren't that.
- Aggron is pretty interesting as an aero check and skarm punish, but it needs OU support to have a playable game against any water type
- I had never used jumpluff spikes before this challenge. I learned the hard way that it needs to be paired with a ghost type so that spinning on it isn't free
- Rest kangaskhan occupies some interesting theoretical space as a blissey check that can cure itself of status. I can see it working with OU support, but it wasn't good enough here
- chansey is absolutely awful. Not a good blissey replacement. No special attack to speak of, it's noticeably frailer on the special side, and it dies to one beat up. I tried using special attack evs and psychic on it to handle gengar on some of these teams, and it wasn't even good at that. It makes sense that Johnald only had success pairing it with regice
- this was maybe the worst set of teams I tried, although to be fair I didn't invest a lot of time trying to optimize them
4. Spikes stall
- (18 Feb) (~1685 peak if I remember correctly)
- (23 May) (1714 peak) [paste]
- hazards advantage + a bunch of defensive mons is the most OP strategy ever conceived because you can win a lot of games just by making reactive and obvious plays every turn
- misdreavus, calm cm slowking, and curse rest regirock all seemed to be good enough win cons vs opposing stall in theory
- heal bell cele/bliss made it possible to use defensive BLs that lack reliable recovery, thus freeing an OU slot for anti-offense revenge killing in the form of aero/dug
- didn't really bother with the superman version much. Realistically I think 95%+ of superman stall needs rest zap
- team 1 is just a much worse version of ABR's skarm mag
- team 3 is just a much worse version of v5. It might be better with dusclops over missy, because it can fill gaps against physical attackers, but johnald had taken clops by that point
- claydol is amazing and was sorely missed. Skarm gar was too much for these even against ladder-quality pilots
- blastoise is a pretty good starmie replacement
- as annoying as gengar is, I think it's probably a good thing that it gatekeeps disgusting stalls like this
5. Trapper teams with bulky wincons
- (06 Apr)
- (16 Feb)
- (14 May)
- (1714 peak) [paste]
- hclat did it with snorlax, so I may as well try it with bold cune and cm recover celebi
- thunder magnemite ohko's skarm, which is pretty funny, but I usually ended up going bulky and pairing it with spin
- magnemite was surprisngly tanky with max bulk and leftovers, but you actually really miss magneton's defensive utility and speed tier on these structures
- holy crap I wish I could use claydol. Magnemite might actually work then, but realistically I couldn't spin vs gar
- as expected, CB scyther didn't work as the anti-offense revenge killer, and no I am not using crobat
- slaking did not work here
- hypno wasn't bad as a general purpose mixed/spdef wall, but I deemed it too vulnerable to status and boosting moves
- this style sucks even with 6 OU mons, and I think it's better with snorlax anyway. Was not worth the time investment
6. Fighter balance
- (17 Feb)
- (28 Mar) (1773 peak) [paste]
- (28 Apr)
- (23 May)
- (24 May) (1720 peak) [paste]
- (28 May)
- (29 May)
- (04 Jun) (1716 peak) [paste]
- (17 Jun) (1782 peak) [paste]
- fighters offensive profile is completely unique and there are many BLs who do the job just as well if not better than heracross & breloom (and I guess medicham now, who was BL while I was doing this challenge)
- because of lack of wincons (clat banned dd mence, dd tar and cm jirachi) fighter offense is harder to realize than fighter balance
- this style has been used to tournament success in the past
- fighters, especially with guts, pressure most gengar teams well, making spinning without claydol a real possibility
- even though johnald banned starmie, blastoise is a serviceable replacement
- given enough time, a fighter will break any team because fighting counters don't get reliable recovery
- fighter balances are notoriously weak to cm spam strategies, but with zam still legal as well as dug/molt/bliss this seemed workable
- alakazam is hard to set up, but it often straight up ends games vs special offense if it gets to +1, and it switches into cm rachi & cm bi and beats them
- Zam synchronize can actually help this structure beat certain annoying walls (tox mence, wisp weezing) but overall zam is too frail to be the only anti special-off option and source of speed on such a team
- p2 does some things, sometimes, but overall it's just a trap
- regirock, for the most part, pulls its weight as the primary tyranitar and aero answer (which I haven't mentioned yet)
- spin maldo is not worth it at all, at least not without OU team support
- agility metagross is not good enough anti special-off either even though it checks every cm mon and can technically switch into and set up on some cm jirachi because this type of team doesn't break waters quickly enough for it
- moltres's contribution is superficial here without spikes even though it can force in blissey which gives fighters opportunities. It doesn't actually wall anything really and absolutely does not solve the special off mu
- guts hp ghost/focus punch ursaring can act like a fighter as a blissey abuser and TSS breaker. It also trades with common zam checks in ttar and metagross, so I thought it worth trying. I found, though, that it doesn't threaten enough of the tier quickly enough to be featured as the sole breaker on a team like this and quickly abandoned it.
- wish blissey was an amazing inclusion here and really tied the style together. Super celebi, though not ideal as the fastest mon, gave some counterplay vs opposing offenses and calm mind strategies. I got the idea to pair it with wish from hclat's original raikou + vaporeon team, and that made it possible to beat some bulkier teams with it as well. In fact, in a lot of ways, this team can be considered an analog of hclat's original structure. It has wish, an anti-offense calm minder with defensive utility, a breaker to progress vs stall, and a (somewhat less in my case) resilient defensive core
- including both celebi and blissey made the special offense mu playable
- all versions of celebi ended up being pretty painful for this style to play against, but there's no real way to avoid that
- I spent the most time trying this archetype out because I was getting the biggest rewards. It's well known that fighters are OU-viable despite their BL status, and (viably) spinning makes the game much easier to play.
- the final team here, I believe, is the strongest team I built throughout this whole challenge and I would feel reasonably confident loading it in a tournament game. Of course it isn't strictly optimal by OU standards, but it's a culmination of a lot of broad concepts and little synergies I found throughout this experiment. I'm genuinely proud of it.
- It's well known that this style, as a whole, is really susceptible to RNG. The last team, for example, relies not only on predicting right against bkc tar (focus punch/slide mind games with regirock and weezing), but also on not getting crit or flinched by it as you pass wishes against it and try to hit it the next turn. I kinda just accepted this as fact and knew that I'd have to get a string of good luck to make 1800 with it. I had one particularly egregious game vs knexhawk, where I flinched down a vaporeon and hariyama out of sand with regirock to win. Sorry man.
7. Spikeless weather clear offense with reversal/flail sweepers
- (Jan) (1780 peak) [paste]
- (May)
- (10 Jun)
- my first team was actually good (see post linked above)
- kinda desparate for options at this point lol, and hclat got 1800 with dugless swift swim
- boredom
- I never really took the latter 3 teams seriously, and they never gave real results
- ttar really does a lot for fighter-based offense, so building without it is hard
- this style is inconsistent no matter how you slice it, so I probably shouldn't have bothered without dug
- kingdra's stats and typing go a long way compared to gorebyss
- cm pass to gorebyss is hilarious
8. Spikeless suicune mixed offense
What made me want to build it:
- water types are invaluable, and suicune is the best one left that's worth building around (pert's job is somewhat easily approximated by BLs)
- As we learned above, suicune stall isn't realistic because the other OU has to be claydol or magneton to have a playable spikes mu, but those were banned by hclat. Even before they were banned, though, it's likely that cune stall wouldn't work because the extra OU slot would be taken by dol/mag and couldn't be used to fit proper revenge killing. I believe before Johnald's run, hclat got close to 1800 with a weezing + donphan + cune bulky build. Weezing technically pressures skarm gar teams well, so with amazing play this could eliminate the need for claydol and free up the OU slot. For me, though, I had had my fill of lose-to-gar stall teams by this point and I wasn't interested in suicune stall anymore.
- I had no interest in suicune special offense for this challenge. I think the style is extremely inconsistent for ladder play even with 6 OU's available. Even if I wanted to try the style, three of the best options for it in zapdos, jirachi and raikou were banned by hclat, and johnald later sealed the deal by banning regice.
- with stall and special offense out of the picture, then, the best cune teams left were metagross-based mixed offenses.
- I quickly realized that the principle challenge here was fitting a viable ground-immune. Mixed offense is notoriously weak to dugtrio, with or without spikes. I really gained an appreciation for what salamence and zapdos do for these sort of teams when I couldn't use them anymore. Weezing ended up being the optimal, although imperfect, solution because charizard was too weak out of sand and metagross's presence next to cune was too crucial
- spikeless & spinless mixed offense struggles the most against spikes, and I wasn't fitting a BL spinner here. Despite how long I've been playing, the first team was my first serious foray into crocune. I definitely learned to appreciate what it does against TSS even if the sleep talk rng wasn't exactly fun to deal with. Crocune made that team playable, but I still consider it too spikes weak for serious play. Having no fighting resist, spikes immune or true dug punish is terrible, and that team doesn't win quickly enough to offset that weakness.
- I built the dd pass smeargle team in about 5 minutes, and I spent about that much time testing it too. Maybe the style could 1800, but that particular team sucked. At the very least, it gave me the idea to include camerupt, which I had accidentally overlooked until then. It also had weezing, which I also hadn't used much of before then. It's definitely the best BL ground-immune, so I don't know how I missed it.
- Camerupt sucks, but with regice, registeel and raikou banned, it's a necessary evil for mix off. Weezing is great, though.
- The middle team used CB meta. I hate using that mon and I hate playing against that mon. I was actually excited to use the 6 at first. It seemed to check all the boxes (booms, physical breaking, a ground-immune, sleep, multiple win cons) necessary for mixed offense, but I never got far with it. Maybe I just played badly those days or got poor rng or overlooked something crucial in the builder. I mean, it's spikeless spinless mixed offense. It's bad against spikes and dug. It also doesn't use agility meta which I believe is crucial next to zam.
- The final team was the last team I built for this challenge and also the most successful. I was heartbroken falling just three points short of the goal after all this effort, especially because this peak came exactly one day after my fighter balance, the best 4BL team I've ever made, peaked at 1782. Like that team, though, I think this team, despite its flaws, deserves to be celebrated. I spent a lot of time with CM +3 attacks zam this challenge, so by this point I'd learned a lot about it. It's great against spikeless offenses if it has space to set up, but it needs ttar, metagross, and snorlax chipped. Venusaur is an excellent tyranitar lure at lead, and suicune is amazing at forcing chip on snorlax. Alakazam is more or less a liability against spikes offenses with jolteon and aero. Offensive suicune forces a lot of kills against, or straight up sweeps, aero + celebi spikes, aka the most common aero teams on ladder. Agility metagross gives another win path versus those teams, and here it's paired with two mons that tend to lure water types and boom them. Metagross also provides zam setup opportunities on opposing suicune by forcing it to rest after eating repeated hits. It's an amazing zam partner and something I'd consider for normal ADV OU teambuilding now.
- Bulkier structures have blissey, pursuit tyranitar or both to block zam and sub cm cune without hp investment. This team does not match up spectacularly against them, but it still has a bunch of tools for those matchups. There's always the looming threat of getting your water boomed by weezing or camerupt and getting swept by metagross. There's sleep to destabilize balance cores (see Vapicuno's offense guide for more info). There's even the threat of venusaur sacking itself to leech seed a blissey and sub cune spiraling out of control in the end game. CM zam itself can break bulkier cores sometimes. Cm blissey has to dodge a lot of crits if it wants to check zam. If blissey lacks twave and somehow gets leech seeded, zam can grab a boost or two and win that way. Zam can force a kill vs toxic blissey teams via synchronize. Teams relying on jirachi for spdef instead of blissey can not only be muscled through with fire punch, but also potentially synchronized a burn or paralysis. The team is really quite decent. I've played it a little bit since my run ended and I haven't regretted loading it.
- Again, I think my fighter balance is better than this team, but I'm not surprised this team performed better. Ladder has a lot of offenses, and zam does really well against those. It's also more resilient to RNG because it ends games more quickly. The honest reason this peaked so high is that I happened to land a bunch of celebi matchups towards the end of my run, and I had an offensive suicune. If I've learned anything from this experiment, though, it's that completing the 4BL challenge, under Hclat's banlist, on this post-jimflation ladder is impossible without thoughtful teambuilding, careful play, and a string of good luck. My last two attempts, I believe, had all three.
Conclusion
Anybody who interacted with me during these last six months knows how much stress the 4BL challenge put on me and how badly I wanted to succeed. I didn't in the end, even though three of my runs were basically good enough. I can't say I always approached the challenge in a constructive way or that it was a wholly worthwhile use of my time, but I can say with certainty that it made me a much better builder and player. Having to do more with less forced me to go back to the fundamentals, reexamine what I knew about the game, unlearn bad habits, and stop crutching on certain mons/patterns I'd become accustomed to. If your goal is to win the next big ADV tournament, I don't think this challenge is a great way to prepare for that. As I said before, you're essentially learning a different metagame. However, if you want to try something new and you don't have anything specific to prepare for, I absolutely recommend restrictive teambuilding challenges like this. If you take it seriously, you will improve.
I want to thank the following people:
- muks for the awesome challenge
- McMeghan and johnnyg2 for climbing high with 6 BLs a few years back and posting about it, planting the roots for me to pursue this back then
- Hclat for his virtuosic builds and play
- giraffefromholland and especially Johnald for listening to my ideas and helping me build
- You, for making it this far and reading what I had to say. I put a lot of effort into this challenge, so I wanted to cap it off with a post matching that effort.
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