Hello! Since there's a suspect going on in the shared power ladder right now, I figured I'd post the team I used to get reqs here. The idea is that you spread poison everywhere with the combination of glimmora, salazzle, and toxapex and then take advantage of guaranteed crits from merciless to power up hexes and draco meteors from giratina-origin and scarfed dragapult. It's also got a garganacl nicknamed sugar cube. I was able to peak 4th on the ladder with this (which in hindsight I probably should have screenshotted). Merciless is a pretty cool ability that will probably never see any use in any other setting, so this is a great chance to play around with it a bit.
https://pokepast.es/632a88e6440591f7
Hope you find it fun!
https://pokepast.es/632a88e6440591f7
Tera water iron defense body press garganacl provides an alternate win condition as well as a defensive check against teams that use a flying or steel type sweeper (though for metagross or excadrill, you'll need to get some iron defenses up before the sweeper comes out). Giratina and pex both have defensive teras to help the matchups against pixilate/punk rock, steely spirit, and dragon's maw teams, and pult has tera dark to deal with common forms of priority. Glimmora runs manual t-spikes to guarantee that you get them up against teams that primarily use special attackers, and it's got tera ground to give it a power boost to earth power to help with the matchup against steely spirit metagross or solgaleo, though that only helps if they don't have rocks up. Most of the time you'll just set rocks up and click attacking moves until it goes down. Realistically, it'll probably never tera. Same deal with salazzle. It just has tera normal to give you a chance to cheese your way into a substitute against choiced golurks or basculegions. Aside from providing the main gimmick of the team, toxapex is running a haze infestation set to beat rest iron defense body press zamazenta as well as to provide some targeted removal against berry teams. Most of the time, you're going to win either by sweeping with scarfed pult or eliminating anything that can beat garganacl or pex. Giratina's mainly here to punch holes, block rapid spin, pick off weakened mons, and give a ground/spikes immunity to your defensive pieces. As a warning, it does have a speed reducing nature, which mostly doesn't come into play except in the mirror match or against jolly max speed crawdaunt, which isn't super common but does exist. Figured it was better to sacrifice a bit of speed instead of giving up on bulk or shadow sneak damage. Lastly, dragapult is as fast as possible to ensure that it out speeds most other scarfers as well as a lot of other scary pokemon that get up to plus 2. I used to run shadow ball instead of flamethrower in case I wasn't able to poison everything, but flamethrower is more useful if your opponent is trying to sweep with iron crown. It's also got infiltrator so pex and salazzle don't get hard walled by substitute.
The team does have a pretty challenging matchup into opposing garganacl and certain forms of hard stall, but thankfully those aren't super common on the ladder now that a good number of players have gotten their suspect reqs. It's got a pretty good matchup against most of everything else.
The team does have a pretty challenging matchup into opposing garganacl and certain forms of hard stall, but thankfully those aren't super common on the ladder now that a good number of players have gotten their suspect reqs. It's got a pretty good matchup against most of everything else.
Hope you find it fun!
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen9alphabetcup-2424391168-okiy2h9louo1aovwti1yi8pk6b4as1dpw