So I won BSS Classic!
I spent the past year practicing old gens of bss because aside from Gen 8, I wasn’t really good at them and I wanted to expand my skill set to be competent in all iterations of BSS. I’m really happy with my results as I’ve absolutely surpassed any goal I had set, my goal for this years Classic was just top 8 and I somehow managed to win the whole thing without dropping a single set. In this post I will be going over the teams I used for top 8 onward, how I came to choose said team, and I will try to give my thoughts on each team. I will do my best to credit creators of original teams where possible but as some of these were ripped from long lost JP blog posts I can’t guarantee I’ll have all of them right.
Generation 8
For Gen 8 I was fairly confident. I started playing BSS in sword and shield and as such I have a fair amount of metagame knowledge.
Round 6:
BAD BITCHES -
Most people probably already know where the base of this team comes from.
Butch Hardnight made a team dump for Sword and Shield with some pretty solid teams and it has become far in a way the most common source for players looking for Gen 8 teams to use for classic. I took his Eternatus offense team and made some minor adjustments, swapping Eternatus to meteor beam instead of specs to maintain flexibility and a couple tiny move swaps here and there to allow things to function better outside of dynamax. Physical Yveltal is a personal favorite of mine, ygod in general is lethal in gen 8 bss but most default to special. Generally I do the same but physical is more than capable and can catch a lot of things off guard. You can see this in my set where Yveltal manages to blow through AV (I think) Kyogre assuming it could counter dynamax to win the war. Choice Band Seismitoad is really fun and can catch people who expect water absorb to be a defensive set, and the rest of the team is fairly standard support. Super fun team and it works very well.
Grand Finals:
POP OUT -
This was a team that
papiloco used during BSSPL last year and it caught my eye when I saw
A Crayfish using it during their BSS Classic run. They very graciously provided me with the paste when I asked them for it and I really liked the base. I ended up making a few adjustments in the end. I swapped Chansey for Porygon2 and swapped Zekrom’s dragon stab to Outrage over Scale Shot. During the set I got very fortunate with a rock slide dodge and was able to play the endgame pretty mindlessly because of that. Overall a super solid team and was very fun to pilot. Zekrom is very entertaining.
Generation 7
Coming into this years classic I was fairly nervous about this gen, as many of the people I would be facing later in bracket made their names through their USM success. Thankfully I was able to enlist the help of USM veterans like
greilmercenary9 and
11oyd to give me advice on play and teambuilding. This support ended up making Gen 7 one of my considered counter picks toward the end of bracket as I became much more confident in my abilities to go head to head with many of the killers that also played this tier.
Round 6:
BURR -
This is actually a team I ended up making entirely from scratch. I started with an entirely different mega choice of Metagross, but eventually settled on MimiMence as those two are absolute monsters in Gen 7 BSS. With feedback from
chemcoop and
greilmercenary9 I eventually rounded the team out with a tried and true double steel core, Thundurus T to wallbreak alongside MMence, and Hippowdon to serve as a physical wall and general utility Ground type. Scarf Heatran is a very viable but scarcely used set that ended up doing wonders for me. Even clinching the win in my set by catching the opponents Landorus off guard and removing it. I’m sure this is by no means the best USM team ever made, but this was my first attempt to build a Gen 7 team on my own and it went very well, and I’m super happy about that.
Round 8:
Pelle Coat -
This is a team made by
Ika Ika Musume that I have had in my rotation for a while. It’s very straightforward and I enjoy using it a lot. I actually didn’t plan to bring this for round 8 but I ended up accidentally loading it. I played pretty poorly and as such this ended up being the only game I lost in top 8 of Classic. Still a super good team and if you learn how to use it properly it will do very well.
Grand Finals:
LET ME CRUSH -
I found this in a list of top ranking teams from back when USM was the current generation. The original blog team had Z Fly Gyarados instead of P2 but I ended up not liking that and swapped it. Porygon2 supported my Megas much better and ended up completely flipping my opinion on this team from “I don’t know if this is really something I like” to “this is one of the most fun and powerful teams I’ve ever tried.” Once again I had help from
greilmercenary9 when it came to how to pilot and what edits were good.
The Squash helped me practice against loads of sample teams and things we expected luisin to bring, and I actually ended up facing a variant of one of the teams we practiced against in grands. Having known most of the sets I was able to play extremely confidently to take the entire tournament. I love this team, and megagross is now one of my favorite mons.
Generation 6
ORAS BSS is a tier I was vaguely familiar with and enjoy playing. If you know what you’re doing the tier also tends to be fairly stable, this led to it being my most common counterpick, as it wasn’t as volatile as generation 8. Because the tier ended up being my counterpick choice though, as I only lost one game in top 8 of Classic, I didn’t really get to play it. Because of this I will be showing off the team I planned to use in grand finals as well, despite not actually getting to use it.
Round 8:
PRESSURE -
Stall is a playstyle I am not very good at, but I do tend to bring it out every now and again if I know the player I’m facing is likely to not be prepared for it. This was the case here, as myself and
yone had decided a stall team like this would be able to clinch the win vs caojie if I dropped a game. This team in particular is just a Japanese style stall team I took from a team dump that
NOVED made. Stall has one main weakness in Gen 6, and that’s opposing Mega Gengar, which is why Tyranitar is on this team. Being able to trap MGar and punish it for attempting to trap one of our own team members can open the game up. The real star of the show is actually our own Gengar, as it can break opposing stall and forcibly remove any threatening breakers. This allows the walls on the team to function as safely as possible, safe in the fact that mega Gengar can come in and pick anything particularly scary off. Both of our mega choices match up well against Mega Kangaskhan, which is very important. Overall this team was a lot of fun to learn and gave me the security I needed to make it to grands on winners side.
Grand Finals:
EVIL J0RDAN -
This is another team that I adapted from a blog team from back when ORAS was the current generation. Charizard Y is a great alternate mega as a lot of defensive play in ORAS skews heavily on physical defense, as Mega Kangaskhan is the best Pokemon in the format in most players’ opinion. The original team had Hippowdon in place of Cresselia but I ended up going with the more standard Cresselia anyway as Kangaskhan often techs for Hippowdon and Landorus T, as exemplified by the set here being a mixed attacker with Ice Beam. Greninja and Aegislash are great all purpose attackers and potential cleaners with their high speed and strong priority respectively. This team never got to shine as I won the set on game 2, but I still wanted to highlight it as it was a very fun team to use and
yone helped me a ton with it again.
Generation 5
GBU, also known as the BW version of BSS, is one of the metagames with the least documentation out there. This made it a particularly enticing choice for me to learn as a potential counterpick, as it’s the most difficult to prep for. Hilariously though, the randomly selected starting tier ended up being GBU more often than not, so this didn’t always get to come to fruition. I only got to play GBU once in top 8 though, but the team I used was very fun.
Round 8:
War Bout It -
This is a heavily modified version of a sand team I took from I think
Charlotte tho I can’t remember exactly. Quite a few changes happened from its original state, I knew I wanted to use Sash Tyranitar as when I played caojie in Classic last year they used Minimize Chandelure, Tyranitar threatens both common Minimize users (Starmie and Chandelure), so with the safety of Sash I would be able to threaten them more easily while setting sand to make sure Excadrill can prevent future attempts more reliably. This team actually had a massive weakness to Breloom, which I remedied by changing the Latios set from a Specs bomber to an all out attacker with Lum Berry. After showing this team to
MZ and
NOVED they informed me that I was, to put it bluntly, absolutely and completely fucked if I ran into a Conkeldurr. This is a slight issue, as conk is widely considered to be one of the best GBU mons. To remedy this we gave Excadrill a Chopole Berry instead of the Air Balloon it was initially carrying, and we also put Counter on Tyranitar. This was the right call, as the end of my GBU game in round 8 came down to Ttar versus Conk, and the sash Counter secured the win.
I’m still shocked when I reflect on the fact that this is the one I ended up taking. I’ve always been a current gen specialist, and never imagined that I would end up winning the oldgen tournament as my first major victory. In a way though, it feels appropriate, what caused me to stick around in the BSS community was the friends I made here, and as shown in this post, said friends are a big part of why I was able to win this tournament. Thank you for taking the time to read this, my experience with BSS Classic this year was truly amazing, and winning the whole thing was the cherry on top. I hope you enjoy these teams if you decide to use them, and I’ll see you all for bsspl soon :)
. It's mostly for people who either joined Battle Spot in Sun and Moon and wants to know what it was like in past generations, or people who want to share their thoughts on these formats either by comparing it to Sun and Moon or through their experiences in future tournaments that involve these metagames.
These might not necessarily be cool or unique sets, but they're sets that I very much enjoyed and think are pretty decent in the meta.
