Big brain combos you've used in-game

[Cobalt Empoleon]

Sometimes it's hard to distinguish between 'big-brained' plays and cheese strats haha. Usually, once you see the strat it doesn't feel very smart or crazy anymore.

Like, in my White mono-Grass run I swept N (after saccing everything else to get rid of Fusion Flare PP) and Ghetsis with SubSeed Coil Serperior because his Cofagrigus has a weird flag that overrides typical good trainer AI so it spams Toxic until either its target is poisoned or it takes damage, even against a Substitute. It's clear that the intention was for it to face your Zekrom/Reshiram, which can only know damaging moves in that battle if you choose to add it to your team.

Any challenge run of SMUSUM makes you feel super smart because strategising around the Totem Pokemon is always a fun time (even if it often boils down to 'spam Charm or Baby-Doll Eyes').

Less 'big-brain' and more 'fun synergy that made me feel like an anime character', but it was neat when I realised I could make my Platinum mono-Steel team a Trick Room Rain team thanks to a surprisingly large amount of synergy:

• Steel-types appreciate having Fire attacks weakened
• all my team members besides Lucario were slow
• Bronzong can learn Rain Dance via the Move Reminder and Magnezone can learn it via TM
• Probopass and Magnezone can both learn Thunder
• Empoleon functions super well as an ace in this setup because it becomes an absolute monster under both TR and Rain

 

[khlaylav]

It's not particularly big brained but every time I Trace Intimidate I feel like a god. Especially because it's on the Ralts line which does not care even remotely about Attack.

Also, between Fluffy, Baby Doll Eyes and one of Rock Tomb, Low Sweep or Bulldoze, Bewear is a debuffing god. Unless it has a Fire type move nothing physical touches that thing.

 

[Magcargo]

This isn't big-brained or even all that good really, but I've been using Fling + Rare Bone on my Pawniard in my current Violet playthrough to give it a 100 BP Dark STAB in most of the Trainer battles. It doesn't lose the item after battle, so its a pretty strong and relatively reliable STAB move that you can get early on while waiting for Kowtow Kleave on Kingambit. Also using Throat Spray Croclar, which I think will be extremely good when it evolves into Skeledirge since Torch Song becomes Nasty Plot.

 

[Guy with annoying name]

Ok so in SV, I always seemed to end up fighting opponents that were far higher leveled than me. Naturally, this meant brute force wouldn't be my solution to beating the game: In other words, I had to use strategy to win. And boy did I enjoy actually using strategy over clicking super effective moves. But here is one that carried me until the end game where I finally caught up:

So I had dachsbun and maushold, plus their pre evolutions before then. They both had baby doll eyes, a priority move that lowers attack. This ensured that when combined with having loads of spare items to use, physical attackers, which apparently seemed to make up the majority of my opponents, would never steamroll me. Plus, Maushold had super fang, to ignore the fact that the enemies had far greater HP and defense than my team due to being 5-10, sometimes more, levels higher. Then, I could finish the opposing Pokemon off with a regular attack, as it was so weakened after using super fang twice that only one or two more moves were needed to win. Even better, super fang doesn't rely off opponents using physical attacks over special attacks, so this works no matter what. Which was great, as PP management could have been a major issue. Yeah, there was the ghost gym, but I already done so much by that point so it was one of the rare occasions before the end of the game where I wasn't underleveled, so I could just fight them with Meowscarada and use normal types to ignore their strong STAB.

Yeah, I had plenty of strategies to get through this, but those two were my personal favorites because of how effective they were.