https://pokepast.es/4b74850c3c85fbae
I built this team for GoldMason in WCoPP 2023, week 5 against Astamatitos. The tournament scout was fairly limited, but I chose to still focus on it because Asta was using newer teams, possibly indicating a new view on the meta, and I did not expect a large change in the style of team brought. The scout included ZapDug with DDmence, Magoff, and a Snorlax-Aero Spinless mixoff as seen below. When prepping, I wanted to make sure I was especially defensively sound into these teams, so I particularly focused on overlapping defensive roles to mitigate the risk of overload.
Astmatitos Week 5 Scout
Offensive Gameplan
The team uses Moltres and spikes as its primary form of progression. Moltres is incredibly threatening against Magoff, while still being very hard to switch into for Asta’s mixoff and Zapdug with wisp. The combination of Toxic Skarm and Timid Magneton with Special Defense to trap opposing Magnetons alleviates the lack of sand making it difficult for moltres to make progress against stall teams using mag or spin to combat spikes. Curse rest pert further handles stall teams, dominating ones lacking hidden power grass coverage, giving the team strong tools to face stall and offense alike. Skarmory lead is often seen on these structures, but swampert was chosen instead to better facilitate a counter-mag trap due to the lack of information on turn 1 to make an informed prediction.
Defensive Gameplan
The team utilizes defensive decompression to prevent overload from zapdug, magoff, and the expected style of mixoff. Magneton acts as hazard control, and allows the team to run much stronger sets. Against zapdug, celebi switches into zap on turn 1, luring baton pass into dug and trades into it with hp grass. Skarm follows with a spike to prevent further dug entries. An investment of 80 SpA ensures bulky dugtrio is placed into spike range, allowing blissey to be used safely. Magneton can check non fire punch gengars to limit one of zapdug’s alternative means of removing bliss. With dugtrio removed, magneton’s special bulk and rest allow it to wall gengar throughout the entire game. Moltres can pivot in on will-o-wisps from gengar, as well as countering common sets containing fire punch that magneton would no longer be able to check. An untrapped blissey safe from gengar hard counters many zapdug partners that otherwise plan to take advantage of its absence. Calm mind celebi is undeterred by blissey but is checked by skarmory and moltres. Calm mind jirachi has the potential to beat any of its individual checks on the team, but due to limited coverage will be safely checked by at least one member of the team. Swampert counters physical members of zapdug, and can pressure suicune with curse.
TImid magneton with bulk gives strong counterplay against magneton offenses, as well as picking off weakened metagross. With skarmory freed, it paired with swampert are incredibly hard to break through. Bold blissey is able to check ddmence and utilize wish to prevent it from being abused by tanks, allowing its partners to switch in with ease and making progress against the physical walls hard to gain due to their now increased longevity. Bold celebi checks snorlax, making it hard for skarmory to be overwhelmed if untrapped. Moltres checks metagross, once again reducing the strain on swampert and skarmory, as well as being incredibly threatening to magoff teams even if the skarmory is trapped, reducing the reliance on the trap. SD pass celebi on magoff is hard walled by skarmory if the mag-mag trap succeeds, while moltres acts as an alternative check against non hp rock celebi. The matchup against mixoff skarmory beatdown is largely the same, utilizing defensive decompression to allow the most important defensive pieces to remain for the endgame. Celebi, moltres, and bold wish bliss make it harder for skarmory and swampert to be overwhelmed, while moltres’s will-o-wisp is incredibly hard to switch into. Mixmence on these teams are checked with relative ease by blissey due to lacking spikes.
Weaknesses and Possible Configurations
Due to the nature of stall and the team being made last year, there are a number of threats that take advantage of no sand or that were not common enough at the time to be accounted for. Milotic with refresh dol make it incredibly hard to make any progress. Jolly heracross takes advantage of modest molt and sweeps through the team with skarmory broken. Snorlax teams that break celebi or have partners that win if celebi is broken need the counter-mag trap to be executed to be combatted. Bulky ddtar can repeatedly abuse celebi and blissey without fear, breaking for its own sweep and for its partners. Sub calm suicune is only effectively checked by celebi and phazed by skarmory. Sub tbolt grass rachi that outspeeds molt has potential to hax through the team. If skarmory is trapped, gyarados is able to abuse the lack of status and thunderbolt.
There are a number of changes that could be made to the team to help alleviate these weaknesses and update the team. Timid molt makes the team safer into heracross and fast pixies, but comes with a drop in power that makes breaking stall teams very difficult. Protect swampert would make the team less effective into bulky waters, but makes it even harder to be physically overwhelmed. A modest magneton makes the team much harder to wear down with spikes, but reduces the teams ability to ensure spikes are up, and hampers the magoff matchup. Thunder wave on blissey over ice beam would make it less vulnerable to bulky ddtar and gyarados set up, but makes blissey walled by taunt gar and leaves the team with no fast way to actually kill gyarados due to it already being statused. Heal bell celebi would allow swampert to make use of rest for longevity rather than for sweeps, but the dropped coverage is incredibly hard to make up for. The change I find most compelling for general use would be changing celebi to seed cm psychic giga drain. Fast seed cm bi makes the team safer into heracross, and is incredibly threatening with mag support. It dominates stall matchups that may otherwise be entirely dependent on curse pert, and offers another powerful path to win games. This would however come with the severe drawback of no longer countering snorlax, making magoff matchups extremely reliant on the mag countertrap and making skarm beat down teams generally harder to handle.
Conclusion
The team was only notably used in the tour match it was built for, but saw a favorable matchup as intended (see below). With the mag trap successfully pulled off it could revenge meta in the future, celebi would be able check snorlax and set up variations of swampert, swampert and moltres could check meta, pass celebi is checked by skarm and moltres, and skarmory is free to be played conservatively to check gyarados. This matchup would be secure unless the magneton trap fails (such as if skarmory is used to initially check baton pass celebi, stopping the double to mag) or if the skarmory were over-relied on midgame, allowing for gyarados to sweep.
vs 
While the team isn't my preferred archetype, nor is it entirely novel, I am very happy with how it came together to target the scout. Supporting Gold for WCoPP was a big moment for me and I feel like my building really started coming together around that time thanks to the help I got and the opportunity to prep against some strong opponentts. Thanks to Giraffe for teaching me building and the help with the team, Leech for first introducing me to a higher level of adv and his help with the team, and to Gold for continually giving me opportunities to practice prepping against high level players (and happy Birthday).
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