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Today's featured charismatic Pokemon is Landorus . His ability to inflict pain onto the metagame led him to catch the eye of doubles players around the globe, hoping to reach invitationals with him. He is, after all, the uncontested best special attacker in the tier. Sheer Power coupled with Life Orb and good coverage lets him delete meta threats like Diancie and Incineroar.
I still included Imprison because even though you can't stop Sandsear it does let you switch Ogerpon-Wellspring in easily. Psychic lets you hit the opposing Landorus.
How to answer Landorus ? Speed control and super effective damage, here are the main things to watch out for :
252+ Atk Choice Band Tera Normal Sword of Ruin Dragonite Extreme Speed vs. 0 HP / 4 Def Landorus: 319-376 (100 - 117.8%) -- guaranteed OHKO
252+ Atk Rillaboom Wood Hammer vs. 0 HP / 4 Def Landorus in Grassy Terrain: 297-349 (93.1 - 109.4%) -- 56.3% chance to OHKO
252 Atk Sword of Ruin Chien-Pao Ice Spinner vs. 0 HP / 4 Def Landorus: 712-844 (223.1 - 264.5%) -- guaranteed OHKO
252 Atk Wellspring Mask Ogerpon-Wellspring Ivy Cudgel vs. 0 HP / 4 Def Landorus: 404-476 (126.6 - 149.2%) -- guaranteed OHKO
+1 252 Atk Hearthflame Mask Tera Fire Ogerpon-Hearthflame-Tera Ivy Cudgel vs. 0 HP / 4 Def Landorus: 402-474 (126 - 148.5%) -- guaranteed OHKO
136+ Atk Iron Hands Ice Punch vs. 0 HP / 4 Def Landorus: 384-452 (120.3 - 141.6%) -- guaranteed OHKO
+1 200 Atk Gouging Fire Heat Crash (120 BP) vs. 0 HP / 4 Def Landorus: 282-333 (88.4 - 104.3%) -- guaranteed OHKO after Stealth Rock
252+ Atk Baxcalibur Ice Shard vs. 0 HP / 4 Def Landorus: 340-408 (106.5 - 127.8%) -- guaranteed OHKO
128 SpA Kyurem Blizzard vs. 0 HP / 0 SpD Landorus: 592-700 (185.5 - 219.4%) -- guaranteed OHKO
252 SpA Tornadus Icy Wind vs. 0 HP / 0 SpD Landorus: 212-252 (66.4 - 78.9%) -- guaranteed 2HKO
252+ SpA Choice Specs Tera Steel Gholdengo Make It Rain vs. 0 HP / 0 SpD Landorus: 396-466 (124.1 - 146%) -- guaranteed OHKO
+1 252 SpA Glimmora Meteor Beam vs. 0 HP / 0 SpD Landorus: 354-417 (110.9 - 130.7%) -- guaranteed OHKO
Knock Off from Roaring Moon is also a very good answer. There are more but you get the idea.
Now for the Ice types clicking Ice moves, Tera is your only option, but a lot of those KOs can be avoided with some bulk investment and, just like the too-famous fictional character, Landorus lives by a code : "Hitting once is good, hitting twice is better". So here are some alternate Landorus sets that will let you get in more attacks than you would by using the sample set :
Ideal when you have an Intimidate user on your team and still want to outspeed Timid Kyurem :
livesespeedorus (Landorus) @ Life Orb
Ability: Sheer Force
Tera Type: Poison/Steel/Water
EVs: 196 HP / 28 Def / 76 SpA / 208 Spe
Timid Nature
IVs: 0 Atk
- Earth Power
- Sludge Bomb
- Stealth Rock
- Protect
When you don't need to respect Timid Kyurem, you need bulk on Landorus and you need to KO Gholdengo through redirection :
KOsgholdorus (Landorus) (M) @ Life Orb
Ability: Sheer Force
Tera Type: Poison/Steel/Water
EVs: 120 HP / 136 SpA / 252 Spe
Modest Nature
IVs: 0 Atk
- Earth Power
- Sludge Bomb
- Sandsear Storm
- Protect
When you don't run Intimidate, have Icy Wind support and wish to live a hit from Ogerpon-Wellspring and Hearthflame. Rather controversial :
fatorus (Landorus) @ Life Orb
Ability: Sheer Force
Tera Type: Steel
EVs: 216 HP / 248 Def / 44 Spe
Modest Nature
IVs: 0 Atk
- Earth Power
- Sludge Bomb
- Stealth Rock
- Protect
When you have no speed control or you wanna be spicy in the builder. Never ever run Modest, outspeeding Scarf Chi-yu, Booster Energy Iron Crown and Booster Energy Gouging Fire is the whole appeal of the set.
I saw Grassy Seed Landorus during DWCOP, I mean, why not with Nasty Plot. At +2, this will KO all the Pokemon that set their EVs to live Earth Power. Very evil :
I stole two teams from Nails replays and loaded an updated version of Lele sand
: The Diancie should be Safety Goggles but I put Rindo because the team struggles slightly into Rillaboom and Actuarily had no Amoonguss usage. Zeraora lives Wood Hammer and Draco Meteor from Life Orb Naganadel. This set is nice if you don't care about being outsped by Dragapult.
Tapu Fini lives Sludge Bomb, I stole that set idea from Noelle. Urshifu lives Expanding Force from Necrozma.
Eject Button is just there to bring Dracovish in more easily.
I think that right now the meta is split into eight archetypes, Regidrago Offense, Psyspam, Cress/Zong Ursaluna, Physical Offense (Paonite and/or Gouging Fire), Diancie semiroom, Gholdengo Offense, Snow/Screens and Sun. I'm going to post what I gave the French players to practice with during DWCOP, which are common builds and my improved SCL/Teamlock/DPL teams.
Something funny I did during scouting recently was check the opponents' Pokemon with the highest winrate. For example, Madaraaaa's highest winrate is with Snow. For some reason mine is with Dragonite.
Tornadus isn't worse than Roaring Moon, they just have different matchups.
Gholdengo Offense :
I knew Akaru was going to focus on something specific in my teambuilding history so I loaded the most standard team possible. I think Shuca Berry on Gholdengo is mandatory on a team with three Ground-weak. This spread lives Earthquake from the bear. Specs Gholdengo offense Roaring Moon lives Ruin Banded Tera Normal Extreme-Speed from Dragonite, which is useful. Pigwarrior19 suggested those 6 and the glimmora moveset during SCL. Apparently this is from Ann who took it from Zee ? Idk if it's already somewhere.
The Moltres-Galar Gholdengo team is also pretty good but Schister's probably gonna post it.
Physical Offense :
I loaded that into Madaraaaa because his team compositions and usage seemed weak to it. His main way to beat it was Tera Ghost. Fast Ting Lu beats Incineroar and Amoonguss Modified sample to fit Grassy Seed Ting Lu. Loses rather hard to Covert Cloak Bulk Up Okidogi. A team I stole from emforbes, although I couldn't bring myself to keep Multiscale on Dragonite. Something from teamlock I never ended up using.
Snow/Screens :
Snow's just good. If you're not loading Snow during the tour, you're doing something wrong. Offensive Snow is nice, you trade better and faster than your opponent. Labubu snow I stole this from a DWCOP game. Tornadus has to be able to hit Gholdengo on this team. It'll KO with two hits, even with Leftovers. I love this shit Named after the French politicians who shut down the government.
Sun: An EternalSnowman team I recreated. What I brought for emforbes since he didn't load much Trick Room counterplay.
Regidrago stuff: I posted this before but it's still good.
The Farigiraf sample and the eragon team with Okidogi are also pretty good.
Cress/Zong Ursaluna:
I find it very difficult to drop Mental Herb. Taunt is so much easier to fit on a team than phazing. I really like this build and I think it's playable into everything.
Diancie semiroom: A teamlock team I brought for Akaru. Again, dirt standard. Show this team to Schister to hear him complain about it. Another ESM recreate. A 5Ft5 build, pretty effective. Kingambit is still a real mon. Something I built for SCL for Bagel, Jello didn't want it so we used it for DWCOP.
I'm noticing just now all the Diancie teams have Landorus, which makes sense given how Diancie checks Chien Pao Tornadus Roaring Moon and Landorus beats down Okidogi and Gholdengo.
Psyspam:
Not a huge fan of this archetype so I don't bring it often.
Stranger things : A build from Zee Choice Specs Farigiraf Hyper Offense Spikes Ogerpon hazard stack Assault Vest Kingambit Rain
Eragon says posting teams is good because it encourages you to build more. But I don't really feel like building more, this is good. Maybe a Maushold team if I'm bored, that mon is too good to never be used.
If you have questions about the sets/team compositions, ping me on Discord and I'll update this post.
I originally wasn't going to make a post for DWCoP. I was asked to support for US Northeast this year, and I agreed because Jello and Chris are cool people and I've never had the opportunity to work with them in a tour before. I was going to sign up but didn't find out until after I had already agreed to help that Maryland is a part of US South and I have a Maryland IP address (Despite being from PA), so I decided to just support unofficially this year. Chris ended up not needing much help with building in the SS slot so I didn't end up doing much of note other than occasionally providing input on teams for our SM slot, but I did end up building a team with help from Chris that I've been liking a lot. This never got used in any official games but we built it during the tournament and I don't want to quadruple post in the SS thread.
Cinderace Sun 3
This idea came about because I was really interested in the high Tsareena usage recently. The consensus around Tsareena has been that it's unviable outside of Rain teams for a long time, but recently more and more people have been using Tsareena on offensive teams outside of the context of Rain. I think Tsareena does actually have a ton of potential currently, and I've talked about why in previous posts, but after playtesting the teams people were using it on I didn't really end up vibing with any of them, so I decided to build my own.
This is the version of this six I built before getting any input from others. This already seemed more solid to me than the teams I was playing before, but there was still a little jank here. Particularly the double water core didn't really feel appropriate here. Scarf Urshifu didn't really feel like all that great of a last slot, and offensively had a lot of overlap with the other members of the team. The problem is I wanted the last slot on the team to be something that was faster than Pheromosa, could hit P2 for good damage and had the ability to outspeed and oneshot Landorus and Dragapult, which was such a weirdly specific combination of traits that nothing else I tried could do all of the things I needed from this last slot.
After input from Chris Numbers, we found that Cinderace actually solved all of the problems I was having. With Sucker Punch it was able to drop Dragapult in one hit while Adamant Cinderace still maintains the perfect speed tier to still outspeed Landorus and Nihilego. High Jump Kick was something I considered for P2 for a bit, but after running some calcs I found that if I run Sunny Day on Whimsicott (we had double fire anyway) Pyro Ball actually does a good enough chunk to P2 in Sun that HJK wasn't needed. With Sun locked in I could also get more experimental with Landorus' last move by running Weather Ball, giving it a 100% consistent option to hit Celesteela without needing to rely on Focus Blast. This does mean we lost Stealth Rock, but everything on this team does so much damage that setting rocks felt like a waste of time in most games.
The new team looked pretty amazing on paper, but after testing the Trick Room matchup felt a little too unplayable. Trick Room will always be hard for Whimsicott teams but for this team specifically felt like it couldn't effectively play into Trick Room at all. Volcanion was also a bit of a problem in testing, as well as a lack of good priority options for the late game. We tried shifting Tsareena to a Taunt set, but AV felt necessary to help with Naganadel, so additional changes would need to happen to make that work. What I ended up settling on is dropping Landorus for Zygarde. As cool of a tech as Weather Ball was, Zygarde had the tools to fix all of the issues I was having. Zygarde with Misty Terrain support has consistent lines into Naganadel, Sunny Day allows it to eat hits from Volcanion comfortably, and it could fit Extreme Speed for a late game priority option. This change let me shift Taunt to Tsareena, and as a final change I made Whimsicott's attacking move Nature Power rather than Moonblast as the nail in the coffin against Pheromosa and Dragapult.
Despite how different the team looks, it actually has a lot more parellels to the Trick Room variants of Cinderace Sun than you would initially think. Nothing in the game resists the combination of Thousand Arrows and Eruption, so if you can get those two on field together you can pretty much guarantee yourself a KO or two. This plays very similarly to the Diancie and Torkoal core, but with a bit of added positional weirdness. Unlike Diancie versions of this core, your speed control and second source of spread damage come from two different Pokemon, causing a little bit of extra clunkiness in getting Zygarde and Heatran on field together in the first place. This is somewhat counteracted by Tailwind just being an easier thing to get set up than Trick Room though. Trick Room often requires Fake Out support to get online, so with a lot of DianKoal teams you won't be able to Eruption + Diamond Storm right away anyway. Because of how effortless Prankster Tailwind is to get up with Tsareena support you can pile on much more offensive power than the Trick Room variants are able to. The only other thing is Whimsicott will ideally need to survive for at least two turns at a time to click both Sunny Day AND Tailwind, but Heatran does enough damage on its own that Sunny Day often isn't necessarily mandatory.
Unlike Cinderace Sun 1.0 that had a fast mode and a slow mode catered to dealing with different Pokemon, both modes of this team are the fast mode, so the approach is a little different. The general rule is most slowstuffs (Anything Genesect speed and below) get blown up by your spread moves while anything Landorus speed or faster gets dealt with by the combination of Tapu Fini and Cinderace. In practice it plays similarly it just looks a little different.
Tsareena ties it all together by preventing most forms of stall with Queenly Majesty, allowing you to get consistent damage off without worrying about pivoting around Fake Out. Taunt Tsareena is a surprisingly consistent form of counterplay to Trick Room as well. You can't really prevent Tsareena from Taunting your TR setter without just killing it, and because no one bothers with Mental Herb in this economy this often gives you checkmate setups against a lot of boards with Trick Room setters where they will never get to set up. The main exception to this is Indeedee Psyspam Trick Room which has the ability to get around a lot of those lines due to Follow Me not getting blocked like Rage Powder, but those teams are uncommon enough that I'm willing to just take the L in those matchups.
This was a really fun team to build. Most of the stuff I build I focus a lot on having solid matchups into all the possible things an opponent could bring, but with how decentralized builds in the tier are currently it was a fun thought experiment to just build something with a broken win condition that wins games by just getting your broken wincon set up faster than your opponent. As much as I love long games and defensive wincons I'm not above just clicking broken spread moves and ending the game in 5 turns, and this team gives you a ton of opportunities to do just that. Definitely one of my favorite takes on the Tsareena structures that people have been running recently, I would recommend giving it a shot if you're interested in playing the tier.
Shoutout to Chris32156 for helping with this team, I would have literally never come up with the Cinderace idea myself. Thanks for reading :3
Well it sure is that time of year again. As of starting to write this, today marks the end of all the SV DOU tours I've played in this calendar year so this post (posts? idk how long this will have to be...) will include basically every serious team I made this year, starting with Derby early this year (have a few teams before that but Derby was the first tour I built for where Arch was banned) and working all the way through SCL (which my team somehow won... still haven't processed that fully but go shoguns). To be the honest the bulk of this post will probably end up being DPL and SCL (I primarily slotted elsewhere during Derby/World cup) so I guess that's mainly what this teamdump will be but it should have a bit of anything.
Doubles Derby III
I primarily slotted natdex this tour and also didn't manage cuz busy so I didn't really do my usual level of slot support for SV. Still, by week 3 or so our SV was struggling and Jello and I thought we'd do better if we moved some slots around so we into SV for a few weeks to lock up playoffs. I only built a few teams during this period but I think a couple of them were actually really high quality so here goes.
I want to say this was like one of the very first modern Roaring Moon teams, it was like the first team I built following Archaludon ban. I used it to a bunch of success in earlier OSDT rounds before I got busy and dropped after dropping to 4-2 and queueing bagel. I loved this team and it kind of served as a precursor to a lot of teams I ended up building this year just because Roaring Moon felt strangely good on this team in a way that it hadn't since like DLC 1. Nowadays the mon has a lot more usage from just about everyone but earlier this year that wasn't really the case (even I wasn't super high on it before this team)
Bonus team from some other side tour
Jello vs Waffle
Jello was queued into Waffle and we were mainly scared of Special Offense stuff, so we opted to fish with Calm Mind Scream Tail into his scout. We ended up basically matching into the opposite of that but the team still performed pretty well, getting us into a pretty winning position before Waffle timed out. This team is definitely not that solid but it was really funny in tests. Scream Tail's speed and high physdef basically make it a Cresselia-style CM sweeper (absent the recovery but plus a lot of speed), tbh could potentially be worth exploring more especially since it has like a billion possible clickable coverage moves but I kind of just forgot about it after this game. Overall fun team, also basculegion is here fsr.
me vs staraptor
This is probably my favorite team I built the entire year, although I definitely built some teams that are probably a bit better than this one if I'm honest. I'm not sure if it was just the early usage of Roaring Moon into a tier that wasn't really that equipped for it at the time but I remember this team feeling genuinely incredible in every test game I played. The Deoxys set was something I theory-crafted off of a few interesting Flash Cannon calcs when paired with Chi-Yu, notably ohking Diancie. After that, I realized that the Icy Wind support was phenomenal for a variety of partners, including Chi-Yu, while Psycho Boost is a ridiculously powerful move with Beads support, capable of nuking basically any non resist in the entire format. Chi-Yu + Deo-S is just a really powerful lead into basically any non Tailwind team, so the question was mainly figuring out how best to support it. I opted to use Roaring Moon for speed control since I was just pretty sure it was broken into what people were spamming at the time and was a much better fit than Torn. Hands and Wellspring followed pretty naturally based on general role compression and I ended up with a free slot. I decided I wanted fairy damage and opted into Enam-t just off of stats and general bulk with the tailwind mode. Might seem like an odd choice but it's really not, could be any strong special attacker in this slot and Enamorus is just really not that bad, also gave me a much needed ground immunity. At the end of the teambuilding process I opted to put U-Turn on Wellspring for some much needed pivoting. Nido forked the 6 and dropped the Enam for a Blursa for several wins across different tours (iirc), further proving the concept. My only struggle with this 6 was building any other structure off of the idea- Moon Deo-S Chi-Yu is just kind of tough to build so eventually I concluded that was kind of the best you were gonna get. Anyways the team worked fantastic in game and then I never ran it again :thumbsup:.
The next week, I think I was on an insane high after building the previous teamso I put Zarude in the builder and started nuking things with cb knock off. I don't think it tested that bad tbh but I held myself back from using it probably because the stakes were fairly high for our team.
me vs seraphz
There was just a lot of Ting-Lu and other cringe(tm) stuff in the scout so I opted to build Okidogi for the first time in forever, teching it specifically to beat basically every Ting-Lu Gouger team by itself. I don't think this team is particularly well optimized but it would serve as the foundation for a significantly more broken team I'd build in DPL. I quickly fell in love with the Okidogi set. It requires a lot of smart positioning due to dropping tect but it perfectly solved the issue I'd had with Okidogi all the way back in the 2023 SCL of struggling to hit a lot of targets regardless of what moveset choices you made with it. Ground/Ice coverage is obviously incredible and lets you hit both Ghold and Lando and basically means you're never walled. To be honest the main issue with this team is that is was super overcooked into Ting-Lu with stuff like wisp Volc rather than taking advantage of the Dogi set to run a more diverse team, something that improved on a lot with the six I built in DPL.
We clinched playoffs off this last team but I slotted back into natdex for semis so I'm pretty that's it for this tour (was surprised my folder for this tour was so small tbh).
DPL XI
I finally slotted in DPL again after what felt like forever (march 2023!!!!) since I didn't self buy last year. I was super motivated so I built a ridiculous amount of teams for this tour across all formats but especially SV. The season didn't go super well but I still had a good time labbing out a lot of different ideas I had, but I made sure not to overdo it with SCL coming so closely after. Let's get the slop teams out of the way first:
(hastily made blend of prehome cringe rain and an old zee sample team)
Next up, we have a ridiculously large number of teams that are probably solid but just didn't get the fully refined treatment so I don't really think it's worth talking about them individually:
(this one was considered for scl at some point)
A bunch of CM Bolt builds. I built these mainly for Hopeless because we thought he'd click well with cm bolt, but eventually I just decided the mon is kind of mid :/ all of these are like fine into most of the metagame but nothing really fully clicked as a team I thought cut it as something that had a good enough matchup spread across the board. I found it quite difficult to build CM bolt without having either questionable Pao matchups or questionable Landorus matchups, stacking Ice and Ground weakness is like a uniquely terrible trait in this format.
these first two kind of look like i got them from somewhere else but idk
This one basically ended up being like Tanner's favorite DOU ladder for like a month LOL. tbh it has aura
Several Rain pastes. Put a lot of work into trying to optimize Basc-F stuff and I think it's generally pretty ok (it pairs quite well with Roaring Moon from my testing) but it kind of has the same problem as a lot of the bolt teams-- ok teams but I just wasn't satisfied with them
Week 1
Week one I was busy with some vacation stuff and got matched into Breakfast Enjoyer, then a relatively new name in DOU but someone I knew to respect a lot after a solid OSDT finish. I really kind of just wanted to play honest solid pokemon this week against a good player, so I opted to build a lot of Roaring Moon goodstuffs this week. In the end, I decided on bringing back that Okidogi set from Derby to help insulate me against Ting-Lu. I'd also taken note of some of the Icy Wind Chien-Pao teams I'd seen running around and thought it seemed titanically broken with Landorus (provided you hit your moves) so that also made onto most of the builds. Speaking of Landorus, Esm had started spamming bulky Lando back in derby and I thought the theory was quite sound so I basically started running various amounts of bulk on every Lando
Here's the stuff I built this week:
Early week team with 3 attack Hearthflame. Most of the ideas are here, ultimately just a mon off of what I brought
I kind of knew I landed on something here and it tested pretty well. Just solid goodstuffs with a lot of tools and was well teched into current trends. Just felt quite difficult into Snow so I knew I had to make a change there, I opted to change it to Hearthflame for the final paste to fix that. Definitely a usable variation of what I ended up bringing though.
vs breakfast enjoyer
Team worked well, not a lot of notes. Not a perfect team but definitely a really solid team that I'm proud of. Ending up shipping it off to akaru and Breakfast Enjoyer himself ended up using the same 6 (with some tweaks) later in DPL for a win. Dogi tera can really just be anything tbh, I'm not really sure why this version was steel
Week 2
This week I was kind of all over the place. I actually started out testing some Cobalion stuff with various Pao sets (as basically a larp Zamazenta)
It's hard to remember what was going through my head with some of these but eventually I decided I wanted fast freeze day in some capacity, which first led me to Scarf Articuno before I started exploring more serious alternatives. this one looks interesting and fun and in hindsight I'm not really sure what stopped me from just running this one
Eventually I just locked in and threw together a Scarf Kyurem team that ended up being another one of my favorites of the year. Some of the moveset decisions are little bit strange but I was just really high on Fairy Coverage into the tier at the time, as well I spamming Ice Ground damage into a lot of stuff. I do think Moonblast Bloodmoon is a really solid alternative to Vacuum wave on AV, since it nukes Roaring Moon and provides good coverage when paired with Earth Power, as well as synergizing well with one of its best defensive Tera options as well. SD Hands is a lot less defensible but its good vibes until you hit Ghold for 20%. Plenty of movesets on this team can be changed but overall one of my favorites. Some fun ideas could be making the Bloodmoon CM for example or making Kyurem Specs. me vs Frixel
Pulled kind of an ass matchup but got a huge advantage on turn 1, although it was still rough (especially after I stayed in with Rilla for like 0 reason for like 5 turns). Would've been an interesting game but I froze his Wellspring to make my lines super safe so definitely got lucky here.
I thought Pigwarrior looked pretty susceptible to Chi-Yu offense stuff with Meteor Beam Glimm so I built this and passed it to Hopeless: Hopeless vs Pigwarrior
It did lose but I think this team was pretty solid. I don't think Chi-Yu is an excellent pokemon in this tier but I do think it pairs well with more offensive Genies teams under the right conditions (or with Spectrier > Lando like on the bagel team)
For our last game of the week, I wanted to bring back Snow Iron Bundle since it's offensive output is still pretty incredible. I opted to use a less conventional Gholdengo set with Pixie Plate to try to squeeze more mileage out of Ghold into opposing Hands, which was of debatable quality since you could argue Leftovers would still be a fine alternative anyways. I ended up liking how it turned out though! 5ft5 vs Robjr
Weird game but the goat was still able to get it done, with bulky Lando coming in clutch in the endgame
Interesting Drago team I built with Helping Hand Incin and Heat Wave Torn to make hitting opposing Ghold a bit easier
Week 3
We wanted to use Diancie in 5ft5's slot this week. I kind of like Brute Bonnet as an Amoonguss alternative with Diancie that's significantly better into opposing Ghold. I think everyone liked this team but we (mostly Ian) came up with something better so it kinda got shelved and relegated to random test games for the rest of the year.
Cold Crew was like almost entirely composed of some fellow Kitchen members so I spent a lot of time just building random shit, mostly with Ting Lu + funny stuff, which I probably should have used but I just couldn't bring myself to load broken pokemon Sneasel-Hisui (its just sneasler with Inner Focus) broken Meloetta
This one was funny and opened my eyes to Iron Valiant a bit. The mon has a lot of flexibility but I like Specs Iron Valiant in particular, it's basically a larp Flutter Mane with a couple of interesting defensive properties like resisting Diamond Storm and being pretty good into Pao. This team wasn't particularly well optimized though, it'd be a while before I built some better Valiant teams.
5ft5 is mainly to credit for this one (he used it in DPL against Opelucid this week) although I updated a couple sets and tossed it into my builder since it was really solid in tests. It's pretty similar to a Char team that's also public but this one doesn't have Kyurem. It's just a really consistent grouping of mons that has a lot of options, just good pokemon all around on this one
As for my own game I was just really indecisive this week and ended up defaulting into an offensive team I built the week before, so this ended up being my worst team of the season I think. I wanted CB lando t to work (with Tera Flying Pao to be extra funny) but there's just a few too many things that are awkward about using it. me vs mike
I got pretty punished for this bring, especially with the Tera Water Ghold which was pretty much unclickable here (should've been Tera Dragon oops). Didn't play in general so hard to make a definitive conclusion but I think the team was just a bad bring (Lando-T moment).
Sapphire used Amnesia Diancie against me in some random tour game (PSPL?) like forever ago and I randomly remembered that which was the genesis of this one. Probably a decent 6 but I don't think this was actually tested.
Week 4
I'm not sure what my line of reasoning was this week but there's a bunch of Amoonguss pastes from around this point in the season so maybe I just wanted to use that mon all week. I like Amoonguss a lot in this tier for its defensive profile into Wellspring and ability to be super annoying into a lot of common teams (I think a lot of teams are pretty poorly prepared into Amoonguss, Tera Grass is the least uncommon its ever been and Safety goggles are even less common, so most teams' best answer is their Ogerpon, which you can just whack with Sludge Bomb anyways if you choose fit).
good psyspam paste, although I think I built some better ones in SCL Focus Energy Hearthflame + Shroom A bit closer to what I ended up bringing this week, Genies team with setup Wellspring + amoonguss to enable more opportunities for the Ogerpon
CM Bolt team it looks like I gave to Tanner for his game. Actually seems like a cool team but I don't remember much about it. Not sure if Ghold is right but rest of the team looks solid. Tanner vs Hybone
Eventually I settled on the following six. This is another one of my favorite teams of the year, it combines Genies with Incin/shroom/Diancie to create a team with a lot of different flexible game paths. This was kind of the peak of my obsession with random Fairy moves and I think one of the first Play Rough Wellspring teams/games. Its a really neat set to be better into Bolt and Hands, as well as sniping Roaring Moon (making the opposing tailwind matchup a lot easier) me vs Yellow Paint
Hilarious replay. I hit the perfect matchup for SD Play Rough Wellspring and it went completely in. Lucky matchup pull on my end but complete cinema.
At this point we were basically out of the tour so I just started messing around with random stuff half in preparation for SCL. Still put some effort into my teams but I wanted to save most of my good ideas for that tour since atp it didn't really matter here.
Fun setup Bax team with Loaded Dice, a personal favorite set of mine. Could also just be SD with Glaive rush though.
I guarantee you nothing can prepare you for the sets on this team
Tspikes mew team with Roost Moon
Week 5
Cool uturn AV Bundle + Glimm team, letting you proc tspikes into some of the more annoying matchups for the rest of the team
I saw a Tera Grass Solar Beam Raging Bolt replay in like OU or something so I built it in DOU cuz it seemed funny (probably bad)
I learned Gengar got Icy Wind, fun pairing with Chi-Yu
Calm Mind Hyper Voice Raging Bolt for a solid spread move. I paired it with Coaching Sneasler and made Pao adamant so it could also be a recipient of Coaching. A bit gimmicky but clicking Hyper Voice with Raging Bolt is good dopamine.
Eventually I decided that I just wanted to click Fairy Damage with Ogerpon again, which led me to the following two pastes: me vs Nido
Really didn't want to queue genies with this so matchup was a bit annoying. I think I played this mostly well until I just forgot to click the tera button on Iron Hands at the end. Shame I didn't get this team a win, I think it was pretty solid although the Hearthflame set was maybe a bit overcooked. I think my conclusion from this week's team was just Play Rough is a lot more of a comfortable slot on Wellspring, as dropping it on Hearthflame means you give up hitting Diancie which can be quite awkward (although fine if you pair it with Ghold or the like).
Week 6
Didn't actually end up playing this week cuz I got kind of sick the day of so I subbed SuckyLucky in against fey. I did build a few more things this week though.
cool sand team with setup sini which helps cover several of the more annoying matchups for sand
This team might be better with Dogi over sneasler. I think necrozma's a bit underused despite being mostly outclassed by Crown, having a 2nd eforce clicker can be good insurance and having meteor beam is pretty nice
Ended up using this Volt Switch Hands + WP Tera Flying Diancie in SCL but this is where I originally built it. It's a fun tech that pairs really nicely with having Ursaluna and gives you a lot of ways to position the bear better.
Another psyspam, maybe this best one I built in DPL, using most of the stuff I was messing around with this tour.
Team I actually ended up building for this match. Solid Tailroom team that mostly is just Torn HO with Diancie Bloodmoon as a slower option into faster teams (Fey had a lot of Pao usage so the Diancie was mainly for that).
Week 7
This week I just built a bunch of funny random ideas and did !pick to choose my team. While none of these teams are particularly incredible, I think they showcase the depth of the stuff you can get away with in SV if you put your mind to it. There's a lot of fringe stuff that you could realistically use to win games even if its less consistent because Tera gives a lot of weird and uncommon mons some way to exert more board pressure.
Fun grassy glide spam team with Belly Drum Chesnaught. Electabuzz is a fringe redirection option that helps teams that are particularly weak to Torn since it's the only one with a bleakwind resist. I'm not sure why Talonflame is here but that pokemon is kinda fun too. Diancie rounds out the team to give it some more depth and give Chesnaught some boards where it can put in work under TR.
Gravity team with Grav apple Hydrapple for funny hustle damage with the damage boost
Bellibolt is one of the slowest mons in the game with acid armor so I thought it'd be fun to use with P2 as a pivot. Rest of the team is kind of boring but it has Bellibolt!
Mike and I had started discussing Drifblim the week previously and we thought it had a lot of potential thanks to a neat typing and an excellent support toolkit. My first instinct was using it with CB Rilla for Icy Wind stuff but we couldn't really get it to work. My favorite team with it had Weezing but unfortunately I actually built it after my game this week. Strength Sap is so annoying on it since the typing can be difficult for some teams to hit once it has the seed boost. It's particularly great into Landorus stuff.
In my actual game I used a psyspam version which I thought would be fun since I rarely have used that archetype in the fast. It's pretty bad into Incin even with the Dogi so you kind of have to cheese it with Tera Blast Crown. Drifblim is solid support for the team with Icy wind/Tailwind stuff and Wisp. me vs sea
I got a huge lead in this game off of getting most of my techs off but I still struggled to close it out since some of the pieces are awkward LOL. Okidogi was still able to get it done in the end thanks to having HHP on it.
The final teams in my DPL builder were all things that I wanted to explore more going into SCL. This first one is a standard six with Ruination Pao, which me and some friends thought might have potential (which I still haven't been able to use effectively so it might just be bad)
I also had a fun sticky web team which has always tested well but I haven't really put much thought into optimizing further. Araquanid typing is pretty nice tho!
Finally, the main thing I was really interested in looking at was Volcarona. I built this scream tail team that seemed like it should just be bad but it felt super broken in a couple of games (not as good in some others but the margins in the good games were crazy) so I felt like I had something. Quiver Dance is just an insanely broken move and with less Torn going around and a little bit less physical offense stuff in the face of a lot of Diancie I felt it had a lot going for it:
Overall, in this tour I spammed tf out of Landorus, Roaring Moon, and Icy Wind, something I wanted to be conscious about using less of going forward. Roaring Moon had kind of caught on a bit during DPL so people were going to be prepping for it more just in general anyways. I also noticed that a lot of the teams I didn't like and/or were meme teams had Iron Hands on them for whatever reason so I also kind of tried to use that mon a bit less after. Something about that guy makes it seem super appealing to include after putting like 3 UR pokemon on the team!
SCL V
For my third year in SCL, I had the pleasure of working with SEA on the shoguns, who graciously bought me again after my first stint with them 2 years ago. I kind of wanted to start this year but I once again gave myself a super busy class schedule this semester so it was probably for the best anyways (the two weeks I did play I ended up being super busy and I had basically zero time to actually build lol). Although our season in DOU didn't go very well, I think we had a lot of cool ideas and our season could have definitely gone a lot better on paper if we didn't have a couple of unlucky games. Anyways our team won the tour so definitely have no room to complain on that front! I'd like to thank laximaGiannis Antetokommo-o for having me on the team- at this point I think shoguns dou is genuinely a little bit cursed but both years I was on this team you guys were super supportive. And of course I'd like to thank sea herself for being a big part of why this season was so enjoyable!
I did most of the actual building this season but the vast majority of these teams we built in vc so they had ideas from both of us (and 5ft5 who was there ig...) For the most part, I kind of tried to limit a lot of the building I did to stuff I thought sea would comfortable with (which kind of worked anyways because I wanted to mix things up from what I spammed in DPL to begin with), so there's a lot less Landorus and Roaring Moon stuff (and even less Iron Hands) even though I think using it would have been perfectly fine in a vacuum.
Week 1 vs ESM
Ok so obviously this was a pretty interesting week 1 matchup since esm and I bounce ideas back and forth a lot. I really just wanted to make sure we had a way to not lose immediately to some random setup mon, especially with some random redirector like Magmar (which actually did end up coming). My main idea was just to have some kind of easily accessible and clickable spread damage early the game to prevent stuff from getting out of control. My first idea was to use something not in either Sea or I's scout, so I "built" this fullroom by kind of just mashing together Hugoroom and an old psyspam team tyo posted:
This tested pretty ok but it's obviously just a pretty linear team and we wanted a few more options so it got ruled off pretty quickly even though I'm pretty sure it could've been a fine bring into esm's stuff. Apparently I build a couple of rain teams this week (I don't actually remember doing this but they're here): third team looks the most solid but again idr building these
I also built a couple of snow pastes, both of which looked really fun until I realized both had 4 rock weaks oops:
somewhat related Eject Button Torn team
Eventually we kind of settled on just something mostly fast but with like some surprise taunt option to shut down early setup. Looks like I tried building out Pao with that idea first:
It was shortly after this I believe that Iron Valiant caught my eye. It has a really deep supportive movepool and has the ability to quickly give something (like Diancie) Coaching boosts to quickly deal damage around redirection while also having a plethora of supporting moves like Taunt or Wide Guard or Encore or just about anything under the sun. From there I first paired the mon with Diancie for the aforementioned Coaching stuff and then built the team out with Pao and Lando, and Incin and Wellspring fit right on naturally. The coolest team about this team was the Wellspring set, which I opted to make super fat so it paired better with both Pao Icy Wind but also with the Trick Room mode- we had a lot of test games where the slow Ogerpon put in work both with encore and just clicking attacks under TR. This was a really cool team that I really stand by into esm. We tried a lot of moves on Valiant but ultimately Sea came up with the idea of running Feint and we didn't really miss anything else over it so that's what it ended up being. sea vs esm The valiant was really cool and probably would've won us the game pretty easily too if the Ogerpon didn't miss power whip (rip). This was pretty much what I expected out of esm this week so even though the game didn't treat us well I still was pretty happy with how the week went since I felt the teambuilding had went well and we mostly got the bring right. I don't think the team was like the most incredible thing or whatever but it was just a good bring into esm. Valiant is a pretty good mon with a deep movepool, definitely like fringe viable. I also think specs is a super real set but we'll probably get to that later.
akaru vs bagel
I also built the skeleton of what akaru used this week. Schister and I rolled up to a test game and we had like 4 or 5 of the same six and the Volcarona just went crazy in the game so schister stole the paste and changed a couple of the sets. This is probably still the best Volcarona team I've built to date, the Glimmora is a pretty great pairing with it that grants a lot of matchup stability. Volcarona set gets over both moon at +2 speed and Ogerpon in Tailwind at +3. It has a lot of different viable items and teras but I think I like tera steel/dragon the most and mostly leftovers for the item slot (tldr it helps the Volc secure the matchups it should be winning, like it autowins vs snow for instance with lefties).
Week 2 vs Nails
I was slotted in this week since sea had a regional to go to. Nails was really not someone I wanted to face (especially this week since I had some midterms to study for) so I just opted to load up another Volcarona team to really see if it was as good as I thought. https://pokepast.es/d37ae2907ac75693
I did try building out a couple of Spectrier teams but they were just kind of mid, had fun testing them though: screens glimm actually tested pretty well since it deters fake out a lot
Eventually I got it down to three teams and it was pretty much just between which matchups I wanted to cover:
These last two were very similar except the Tusk one was a lot better into Ting-Lu stuff and the Bloodmoon was a lot better into Torn stuff. Nails had just used a Torn team so I opted to stay on the side of caution (and then queued Ting-Lu oops) me vs nails
I do think this team was like fine, maybe not as good as the one I built the week before but it was still workable I think. Definitely should've used Moon a bit more in this game but it was still a pretty uphill battle regardless I think. Shame I didn't load the Great Tusk team since that would've been a good pull for this (it's kind of the one thing Tusk does pretty well into that the other grounds are bad at facing).
Week 3 vs Bagel
Sea was back in for week 3 and we noticed a couple main things when looking at the scout, primarily that we thought rock damage was a really solid bring into him. By the time the match time rolled around though the week was decided so we opted to troll a bit and bring Iron Boulder since we'd had it in the teambuilder earlier in the week as a joke. There were a lot of semi-considered teams this week so I'll just go pretty quickly through the ones that weren't really that considered:
Interesting Psyspam team (kind of similar to the stuff I built in DPL but with glimm)
Whack Diancie team that was pretty all over the place. This is definitely some shit I'd load though shoutout amoonguss
This team was pretty seriously considered and honestly could've been loaded. I really liked the look of this 6 with a bit of a unique take on Genies but it wasn't like something that tested particularly well so it wasn't really a priority to bring it especially after the game didn't matter.
This actually ended up getting loaded later in the tour since I wanted us to use snow at some point but it was originally built this week. Cornerstone is an interesting pokemon on snow thanks to matching up well into Hearthflame and Incin which is quite nice. I made it Knock so we weren't fully walled by Ghold which was something I'd seen schister mention before and definitely seemed like the call here. Definitely could've been brought this week and it might've done a lot better here than when we actually loaded it.
sea vs bagel
We had tried a bunch of different things with Boulder but they were all kind of mid so I put Roaring Moon on it once we decided to actually fully commit to the bit and load it this week. Boulder hitting through protect is pretty nice but clicking anything else is kind of mid so I just made it stabs with SD. If it was like literally any other secondary typing the mon would probably at least be okish but psychic is just so terrible on it LOL. The speed is pretty nice in general though. Not much to say about the game, matchup was just really volatile so we just had to hope we won ties and hit our moves off lead and that didn't fully happen so the deficit was pretty difficult to overcome.
Week 4 vs Madaraaaa
Both Madara and us had been struggling going into this week so this was kind of a strange matchup. I talked the matchup over with Kunal and he just thought Madara was criminally Drago week so I stole an old team of his, made the Drago Jolly for the opposing Moon matchup since Madara had some recent Moon usage, and made it Okidogi instead of Iron Hands to give us a more modernized version that had an alternate wincon. I don't think I really built much else this week, I kind of just thought this was the safe bring into Madara and it ended up paying off. sea vs madaraaaa
We got the matchup we wanted and despite a pretty weird game with questionable moves on both sides we did come out on top. I think this was like our worst week both play wise and prep wise (at least until this point in the season) so it was funny to see it be our first win, although it was much appreciated after sea had multiple unlucky games to start the season off.
A few other teams I think I built around this time:
BROKEN HARIYAMA!!!!! Some combination of me, Kunal, mike, and schister thought it was really funny (idr who exactly) but I built it out and this was a really fun team to use in tests for a few days. Eleki is probably at least somewhat useable although being just a bit slower than Moon is pretty sad and the ability nerf sucks obviously.
Funny loaded dice Gouger team with Ruination AV Pao.
Week 5 vs Akaru
On paper this game was Sea vs Akaru but this was really kind of a builder mindgame between me and schister, who obviously know each other quite well and so I had a lot of insight to go off of here. I decided I wanted to try screens into them since it was something that had seen some use by other scl players so far in the tour and had seemed solid to me, while also not being something Schister would expect us to use. That was mainly the direction we went this week and a lot of the time was just spent determining which one we'd actually end up using. I also really liked Volcanion into their scout, it seemed like it got a lot of guaranteed value especially with AV and goated move Overheat.
I did first build this very offensive Chien-Pao team that spammed Haze next to the Ghold, which was really fun to do but often was difficult to position. Solid offense team that I think is definitely usable but we wanted something a bit more airtight for this game.
The earlier pastes were more centered around Volcanion, with Fake Tears Grimmsnarl being used with it to help support its damage output. Ultimately though, we decided we wanted something that flowed a bit better. There was also an SD Hearthflame version but Volcanion had just seemed so good so we didn't go that direction (would've been totally fine though). I brought back the Tera Flying Diancie + Volt Switch Hands combination and it eventually lead us to the final paste, which had Ursaluna to more or less bring the team together with a fully fleshed out TR component that paired nicely with Sini and the WP Hands. We went through a lot of 4th moves on Sini and basically decided strength sap was broken on it with screens just to help keep Sini (in many ways the focal point of the time) around as long as possible. It's a hilarious move that often heals Sini all the way back up to full if you get it off, and you can also side Sap into your Diancie if you think they'll protect since you have Clear Body. sea vs akaru
Tbh maybe my favorite game of the season. We got a pretty decent matchup and sea got to show off almost all of the cool things on the team en route to a solid victory. Overall, one of the most solid teams I built this season and I was really happy with how it turned out.
Week 6 vs Fey
In week 6 we kind of started to hit a rut. The team and game last week had been really solid but I missed a lot of time early in the week which gave us less time to prep, and it was a bit difficult to prep into Fey (despite me knowing him well) since he hadn't been super active before DPL and also can be kind of all over the place in terms of choosing teams so getting a read on him can be hard when he's not loading Chien-Pao with barely any changes every week and somehow winning anyways (like in DPL this year). One of the main things I focused on was wanting to have a good Zong matchup since Mike had gotten both me and sea with it in DPL so it was definitely something that could've come. I had a lot of ideas this week but I couldn't really fully get sea on board with any one of them individually, so it basically took us all the way until game time to lock something in and even then I don't think either of us were satisfied LOL.
meme team I built at the start of the week, body press glastrier is a hilarious fish option with tera since its stats are so ridiculously high
Funny grassy seed Cress team with Flutter Mane coverage. I honestly think we could have just loaded this, I was pretty confident in it as a fish into Fey and Mike specifically. Sea ended up loading it in DWCOP into a much more difficult matchup than we probably could have expected here so this team never really got a chance to shine (into anyone else Cress probably would not have been tera ghost but they had low Ghold and high Ursaluna so that's why it was that here).
The main idea I ended up trying this week was Manaphy with various support stuff. It seemed like a cool mon, especially after I discovered that Tail Glow --> Hydro Pump Ohko's basically every Ghold in the format which is neat. Coincidentally I learned after the fact that Mike was also looking at Manaphy this week so we could've been really close to having a Manaphy mirror.
Some other stuff that was considered for a bit but didn't get super far in the building process
Eventually I settled on some Moon stuff with Chi-Yu and Grassy Seed Ghold, which I thought seemed pretty good. For some reason we really wanted to use regular Moltres for the Ground immunity so I made a version with that as well.
This was almost what we were going to load but we changed off of it at the last second. This was basically an attempt at modernizing and taking another direction with that Deo-S team from earlier in the year, this time with Power Herb Meteor Beam to snipe Incin with Chi-Yu on the field. I really liked this team but I think we just didn't quite give ourselves enough time to fully test it out. Definitely a fully usable team though imo.
Ultimately we settled on loading Diancie over Deoxys, which I think was a sizeable downgrade from Deo since it adjusted the pace of the team significantly but was just a comfort pick on a limited amount of prep time. I think this structure was pretty solid but we didn't really fully nail it down. sea vs fey
This week I didn't really extensively scout but I took great inspiration from the team zee had used the week before with Grassy Seed Body Press Ting-Lu, a set I had been aware of for a while but hadn't used in like forever. I asked Kunal for the paste and basically started forking it into a bunch of different iterations. I think that team is just really strong and Seed Ting-Lu is probably the most threatening set it can run in this tier right now. I was particularly interested in trying it out with Dondozo, since Ting-Lu Dozo is just a good proven archetype that both had good vgc results and has worked well in DOU the several times I'd built it out before. These teams tested fine but eventually I came up with something far scarier...
The reason I really liked this structure so much was just for the defensive profile. I'd tried to build a lot of different teams with Ting Lu Gouger Pao before and it'd always felt really inflexible, so dropping the Pao was something I hadn't really fully considered but kind of solved all my issues with the archetype. I do think it's a bit vulnerable to queueing random defense boosting stuff like Bulk Up Dogi but on the zee team the scarf Ghold helps a lot. For whatever reason, shortly after this I remembered that Pecharunt was a pokemon and I decided to build it out on this same kind of team. The poison typing is just solid with this kind of stuff and spreading poison gas confusion with the grassy seed Ting-Lu just seemed incredibly toxic.
sea vs jello (and mike vs pigwarrior dwcop)
Even though it lost (shoutout ruination missing the one pokemon it needed to hit) I think this team was really great. It tested really well and I really liked how it all fit together. A few of the maybe less conventional choices with this were the physical pecharunt (which I really like when paired with the Gouging Fire, it just gets higher base power moves on that side of the spectrum and one taps stuff like the Ogerpons) and the Eject Button on Sini (which wasn't super incredible but I still stand by it for some extra positioning help). It was really funny that both times this team queued into seed Ghold so Poltergeist was useless into it but that didn't really end up playing a particularly big factor in either game.
I also built a Bronzong Ursaluna version which was extra toxic but not quite as much of a favorite of mine:
Week 8 vs Ann
This next week I was pretty busy so our prep wasn't as high quality, but we'd basically agreed that this was the week to bring snow if any, since loading it in week 9 against zee who was spamming solo Kyurem on every team seemed troll. I built several new builds but ultimately sea didn't like them as much as the previously made Cornerstone team so we ended up loading that and queueing just about the worst possible matchup for it. In hindsight loading that team into the team that was out of the tour and more likely to cheese was super troll but whatever it's ok. sea vs ann
No comment
The first thing I built was actually Goodra-Hisui snow, which actually tested quite well and Sea was pretty close to loading it since she was kind of a fan of it. There were a few different variations:
(the most real one)
Obviously goodra isn't the greatest mon in the world but I think the theory here is pretty solid. Goodra hard punishes a lot of the fire types that match up well into Snow, basically ignores Glimmora, and beats most Ghold 1v1 with Fire Blast, while the snow mode helps Goodra out a lot against the things that are most annoying for it like Lando-I. The only thing was this just tested completely awfully into Dogi which just like sits on the entire team except for Lando-I, so I had plenty of games this week against Bagel where this team just seemed completely ass.
I also built a couple of Roaring Moon teams that I really liked the vibes of but the day I built them I was playing pretty bad so they lost a couple of test games and then I forgot to explore them more:
I was pretty into testing Life Orb Ghold around this team, metal coat is probably a little bit better but the extra damage is super nice in some situations, getting easier kills on some of the bulkier mons in the tier.
After I got Espathra'd super hard out of LCQ I decided I wanted us to load Espathra in SCL but I didn't manage to convince sea in time (it would've won though trust). I tried a few different things but I decided I liked this the best. Kyurem and Volcanion are both excellent recipients of the Espathra boost and also cover very well for a couple of the matchups where Espathra can't get it going (like Pao stuff). I made the Incin super fast with taunt to subvert other taunt counterplay to Espathra. I think this team is pretty well optimed at being uncompetitive and the tier would greatly benefit from an Espathra ban.
Week 9 vs Zee
I ended up slotting this week to give sea a break after a couple of rough weeks and I started the week intending to prep but got pretty swamped with schoolwork so I ended up just building a funny snorlax team the night before and loading it. It probably should've won but I didn't really play particularly well after I got the lax setup and the fact that I didn't play a single test game with it before the game cost me a bit. The team is probably significantly better with Ursaluna > Lax but Lax has thick fat and is way funnier. me vs zee
That said, I did have a team that I built the week before in anticipation of this week, but unfortunately I'd accidentally loaded into Kunal for a few tests for DWCOP so I decided it would be a little too troll to load it here. I was a really big fan of it though and so I'll go pretty in detail into what I liked about it:
While Rain isn't a particularly great archetype in this tier, Wellspring is still an incredible clicker with Rain up and it makes Ghold Amoonguss really strong as a core. Kingdra is solid clicker as well that really appreciates its access to Hurricane in this format while Pelipper (although a bit bad) still has some valuable moves and some decent damage. The main mode of this team is really the Incineroar Ghold Amoonguss stuff though. I really like the support this unorthodox Incin set offers next to Ghold and Amoonguss just feels incredible when you're compensating for its fire weakness with Rain. The Ogerpon is mostly just here for some extra damage and an alternate wincon. I originally had SD Play Rough on it but ultimately settled on Superpower since it both lets you hit Moon and Kyurem for a bunch of damage and hits Wellspring fairly hard as well, which was the main problem guy for this team. Final note is that I found some really nice calcs with Hydro Pump Kingdra that Weather Ball doesn't hit, like solid rolls to OHKO opposing Ting-Lu and Gouging Fire. Weather Ball is definitely still a fine option on it but Hydro Pump just obliterates things in a way Weather Ball doesn't completely replicate. This is just a really solid team that features some unorthodox choices that just so happen to really fit well together, maybe my favorite team that I built this SCL.
Semifinals vs Bagel
For semis Sea was once again paired against Bagel, which was actually pretty nice for us since we'd kind of held back from revealing everything we'd prepped against him when we played in regular season. We also had Xrn and Feyy helping us for playoffs which helped us lock in a team a bit more decisively. We kind of tried a few different things including some Glimm stuff but ultimately my main idea was just that a lot of Bagel's brings were pretty weak to TR. It was a bit of a risky bring since we'd brought a lot of TR in recent weeks just because sea was comfortable with it, but here it just seemed like a solid bring. We also considered loading bagels own spectrier team into him with a few changes but ultimately decided TR was a safer line.
The first team built off a few of our earlier ideas into him with Double Rock, but I thought Hearthflame was just a bit better of a pick since it gave us a bit of a faster mode and a big damage option with Torkoal, as well as enabling Trick Room going up, which I think was the correct choice. We built these from scratch but they're actually pretty similar to some of Chris' Cinderace teams which is pretty funny. The most major thing I can think of here was the Fire Punch on Ursaluna, which xrn suggested and I was really down for as soon as it got brought up, it just enables safer clicks with Ursaluna into Ghold boards and Sinistcha stuff (and just straight up ohkoing sini with sun up). It's a relatively standard team but I really liked how it all came together, definitely one of the most all around most solid builds we had this season and it paid off in the game: sea vs bagel
Finals vs Akaru
After a week off for the other series to go to tiebreak, we ended up matched into Akaru and Schister again. We noticed right off the bat that they were super heavily dependent on Moon and Ghold so punishing that was the number one priority. I had a few different ideas going in and a lot of time to think about it:
I kind of wanted a lot of damage mitigation into them so this Chi-Yu set came to me in a dream- just a strange combination of 4 moves meant to take advantage of CTS and fully subvert expectations of what a Chi-Yu would click. The rest of the team is pretty whatever I didn't spend a lot of time optimizing it, but I think it would have been a fine direction to go down.
SCARF CHIEN PAO. This was another whacky idea I had that honestly tested pretty well. Pao is a strange scarf candidate but the speed ceiling it hits is so high that it starts to really get over everything and cause problems with Icy Wind. It also completely screws over most Roaring Moon teams if they don't account for the possibility of scarf, since it's difficult for a lot of those teams to keep pace with the rest of this teams heavy hitters without Moon.
An interesting sun construction. I thought Lilligant or sneasler could maybe be nice if we wanted to be solid into Moon but I don't think we really tested this one that much.
This was the sneasler idea. I kind of decided that I really liked CM bolt into them, a lot of their teams seemed unable to really deal with it once it got going. Generally I don't like Bolt that much (as stated earlier during the DPL section) but I swallowed my grievances and built this team out. I rather like this particular build and think has some solid potential. The pacing might be a little bit off between the Pao stuff and the Bolt stuff but I think this team just gives Sneasler plenty of chances to be funny and spam coaching which is nice.
I don't really remember who suggested Kingambit but we thought the idea of having two different setup mons with a Roaring Moon core also seemed nice. Kingambit was kind of a demon into a lot of the scout but maybe should have been AV if we were going to try it more seriously.
In the end, we ended up fixating on Bolt and I decided that if we were going to use CM Bolt as the main guy, ESM's lost box stuff seemed like a half decent bring. I really didn't like the look of Moltres into the scout so we tried a bunch of different things in that slot. My original idea was a setup Dogi since that seemed like quite a threat into a lot of their teams too, as well as giving us a Poison type to be a bit more solid into Glimm and Physical offense stuff. However, Sea and Xrn didn't like how the Dogi felt, especially into Lando stuff so we went searching a bit deeper. I then suggested Calm Mind Bloodmoon as an idea but that didn't really lead to much either. Sea eventually opted to run Bronzong in that slot but I was out and about for basically the entire day of the game so I don't have the final paste in my builder. I think in hindsight the Dogi was the best one and I should've pushed for it more (we got really punished for taking it off). Not our greatest work of the season but thankfully the rest of our team clutched up and we won regardless.
I think this maybe should've been the triple attack Bulk Up Dogi set and that would've helped but we kind of just ran out of prep time. sea vs akaru
We ended up queueing a team that was pretty well prepared for most setup and TR stuff (a bit less so into Dogi though unfortunately) and the game went pretty south pretty quickly. Maybe Lost Box wasn't the right fit for this week but it's still a really solid archetype that can be really punishing if you're not well prepared for it. I think the main struggle we had with it was just losing that Ground Resist from dropping Moltres made some of the matchups into Lando a bit more annoying, but I think it probably could've been fine if we just ran a few more test games and came up with some more well-defined lines. It's all good though, we won the tour regardless so shoutouts to all of my incredible teammates for that!
DWCOP VI
I mostly slotted SM this tour until playoffs, where I still didn't end up playing SV because we lost first :(. Stay tuned for oldgens teams at some point later this year. Here's still a few fun teams I ended up building although most of our SV slots just loaded old teams and we kind of got hard punished for it (oops).
Decidueye has a hilarious toolkit and hitting Ghold hard with Scrappy is great. unfortunately you need the 50% crit from Triple Arrows to get the ohko on bulky Ghold but just hit it the 50/50 yk?
Fun Spicy Extract team with Foul Play Moltres and Diancie. Spicy Extract into foul play basically one taps everything in the format, even strong resists like Iron Hands if you Tera Dark the Moltres.
AV Iron Crown psyspam team schister and I theory crafted. In theory the Volt Switch positioning with Iron Crown could be really nice in this format but I don't think this is fully optimized yet.
A couple of psyspam teams with a more dedicated Trick Room mode to help beat up Incineroar for the Iron Crown. These were kind of fun, might explore more at some point
Yet another Coaching Sneasler team, this time with AV Ting Lu as a recipient.
This was something I was considering using into Waffle for quarters if we actually ended up playing. Cool semiroom team with an Ursaluna that has a little of speed invest for some tailwind stuff. I was mostly just trying out some new stuff with Cress.
The Specs Iron Valiant team. This team is really fun. Valiant mostly hits Flutter numbers with Moonblast and is faster than everything bar Moon and Pao, so it's honestly a pretty great option into a lot of the metagame right now. I wish the attack base stats were like literally anywhere else but it definitely gets the job done. Moonblast is a very powerful damaging option and DGleam always does a bit more than I expect. Rest of this team is mostly goodstuffs.
Some General Tier Opinions
I think the tier is generally in a really great spot. The Archaludon ban helped a lot and the format is the most stable its ever been. I wouldn't really change much other than the quality of life update of getting rid of Espathra, something that's highly annoying to account for in the builder and adds nothing of value to format. It's not something that comes close to making or breaking the tier for me though. Here's my rough VR:
There's kind of a lot to unpack here but here's what I think the main takeways are from DPL/SCL:
-Kyurem is very good on it's own and its usage has crowded out Pao a bit as a solo Ice type on teams
-Wellspring and Incin are clear #1/#2 (I think this has been true for a while)
-Roaring Moon is a valid Tailwind setter that rivals Torn pretty effectively and with a bit better utility (TLDR Breaking Swipe > Icy Wind)
-Okidogi is very good, I think Bulk Up is a bit more threatening but AV having access to the nuclear bomb that is Gunk Shot makes that set valid as well
-Rillaboom is back, lots of things are spamming Grassy Seed effectively (Ghold, Ting-Lu mostly)
-Physical offense is at a low right now imo, lots of counterplay has been developed over the last year between Diancie, seed Ghold, Swipe Moon, and high Incin usage that sometimes just runs wisp and annoys your whole team. The best Gouging Fire teams imo don't really use Pao at the moment and rather just click Body Press with +1 defense Ting-Lu. I don't want to be too reactionary here, pao is still incredibly good but I think a fall from Tier 1 to Tier 2 for now is correct
-The most splashable winconditions or damage dealers are Ghold and Lando
-Bronzong is good (unfortunately). Generally anything that can pair with Ursaluna is really really strong so I've moved Cress up a bit as well. Ursaluna is ridiculously strong at the moment and is closer to being broken and banworthy than anything else (which says more about everything else than about Ursaluna). It's extremely difficult to play around Ursaluna 100% safely, which makes it the strongest wallbreaker in the tier when TR is up. It's not quite at the top of the usage charts or anything but I think that's probably a bit incorrect. Could be Tier 2 if TR was spammed a bit more
-Torn is down but not out. Torn is probably a comfortable Tier 2 pokemon at this point but there's a lot of matchups where it feels difficult to bring. Taunt has surpassed Icy Wind as the move of choice but having prankster makes taunt less valuable on it than something like Moon. I think we'll be seeing some new innovations in Torn/genies teams in early 2026 that are better able to take advantage of its toolkit. It still won most of its games in SCL, which although winrate is kind of a fake statistic, I think indicates that people are being a bit more deliberate about its usage these days which is a healthy thing imo
Some smaller things:
-I think sneasler is good, I like the idea of spamming Coaching with it but I didn't actually end up bringing it much. Something to keep an eye on if you like to build
-I swear Volcarona is broken but I haven't cracked the code yet fully. Spdef boosting stuff is just good in general with Ghold/Lando at the top although you obviously have to fear the Tera'd Ogerpons pretty hard with it. I think it's particularly great with Moon
-Amoonguss is broken, people really need to use it more
-idk if EternalSnowman will post his teams from SCL but I saw almost all of them and they were really well built. He was kind of using teams that were a bit ahead of the field in this tour and I think people should pay attention to his Week two, four, six, and eight games in particular!
And that's that! Thanks for reading and we'll see where the next year takes us with Champions coming out and gen 10 probably on the horizon. Should be fun!
Hello, because eragon asked so nicely, I'll post all my SCL teams and some thought process behind all of them. I think overall I had quite a good tour, wish we had the opportunity to play in playoffs, but alas that isn't the way the cards fell. I'll also post my thoughts on the current meta at the end.
Week 1 vs SEA (W) -----
My read was just to bring something safe that can outplay, ideally with a setup cloak mon, since in the replays I watched of SEA from DPL, they faked out pretty liberally into things that didn't reveal items. I got got pretty hard in prep by eragon though, as the feint + taunt really ruined me, but I got bailed pretty hard by a Power Whip miss. Still think this archetype is quite strong however, and magmar is generally underplayed. The team is centered around Manaphy + double follow me, with the goal being to setup with Manaphy behind redirection and then get speed control with Torn later. Latios/Dogi provide alternate wincons/pressure points.
Week 2 vs Ann (W) -----
After week 1, I wanted to bring something that showed the rest of the field that they still have to respect the strong mons in the builder -- part of the advantage of being willing to play off-meta is the threat of the builder and so I want them to be forced to prepare for as many things as possible. This team revisited an earlier concept of slow bulky Lando + tailroom, with Diancie/Moon being very ideal partners since they bring a lot of utility and offensively can complement Lando quite well. Incin Amoonguss adds a strong backbone to the team that is good at supporting Diancie, and also takes advantage of Moon/Lando/Wellspring being good into Gholdy. This kind of team is very reliant on good play, but I felt confident in general and despite loading into what I think was a good bring from Ann (notably Prim was quite annoying for this team), the team still came with enough outplay tools to win the game.
Week 3 vs Zee (L) -----
Despite this being a loss, this might have been my favorite team from the season. I also choked horrendously to lose this game (oops). I had already cooked something similar in the prior week w/ BM > walking wake, but felt it wasn't quite ready (and that I wanted to bring something more standard), and wanted to run stuff that was a bit off script. I felt that gholdy was a likely bring into me, so wanted to cover that with hearthflame as a centerpiece for the team. I liked how this team was able to mix modes very cleanly, with Fari-Torkoal being good in TR, Fari-Rilla activating Seed gave a lot of staying power for Fari (fari doesn't have an ideal item outside of seed, so seed works so well for it, unlike sitrus which makes it vulnerable to knock from incin, which u want it to beat/sit in front of). Although I'm unsure of what other teams could actually use Seed Fari, this team was really able to make good use of it, and brings out a lot from an otherwise shitmon.
Week 4 vs ratpacker (W) -----
I think in general cloak is a quite underplayed item for how powerful it is in CTS (or even just in general), and you will find that as a general theme in a lot of teams that I brought this SCL. A lot of pokemon that aren't extremely item reliant can utilize it to great effect, as often stealing one turn away is a death sentence. And a lot of the benefit doesn't even just come from Fake Out as dogi as a perfect mon to represent this, as it is able to nullify Breaking from Gouger/Moon, which was the idea behind this week's team. Another interesting thing to note is the double Shuca which also is an item I feel is quite strong in the current meta, as you can really take advantage of the CTS aspect of it, while still allowing for certain mons to either be less tera reliant (in the case of incin) or play teras like Electric on Diancie, that allows you to deal with Gholdy a lot better. Otherwise, a lot of the same concepts that I discussed for the Week 2 team still apply here, with the main benefactors being dogi/diancie here.
Week 5 vs Nails (W) -----
With this weekend being a regional weekend, I had very little time to prepare and thus I asked for an early game and brought out Lost Box since I also knew Nails wouldn't have much time to prep either. Variations of this team are still undefeated for me in major tours and I credit that a lot to the fact that my opponents are forced to prepare for many different teams AND the ability to outplay with this archetype being very high. The vessel of Sableye Comfey allow for a lot of different ideas, and Moltres-Galar is perhaps one of the strongest pokemon to receive extra resources, behind screens with Comfey, it is able to single handedly take over games.
Week 6 vs bagel (L) -----
This team was built off a "stall" concept with the idea that bagel had shown a lot of weakness to glimm in the past. After glimm, the team utilizes a lot of damage mitigation and healing + Diancie to clean up. Bagel loaded a quite good matchup into me, and I missed a Snarl to lose the game for sure (but realistically I can't complain when I had gotten lucky to win other games earlier). This team struggles a bit against teams that can blast through the defensive pieces, so HO stuff, but is quite solid vs anything more midrange-y.
Week 7 vs MADARAAA (W) -----
Having brought a lot of slower, more passive teams so far this season, I decided that I wanted to throw an aggressive HO team into the mix to show different looks. I thought snow looked quite good, but wanted a more aggressive look to it, so this is what I landed on. The team is relatively straightforward, just hit them hard until they die. As I mentioned earlier, cloak is a broken ass item, and I was able to win this game off a Fake out into Kyurem. Also worth noting, the night prior I was given info that MADARAAA was running paonite on ladder, so I made some minor changes (Ninetales was Sash Ghost), but he didn't end up bringing that team lmao.
Week 8 vs Akaru (W) -----
Despite Gholdy having had a good tournament so far, I hadn't used it and I wanted to mix that up into Schister who definitely likes to read into his perception of players a lot when building. (Side note, I felt Gholdy had a lot of similar counterplay to some other stuff I like, including stuff like Chi Yu and Ting Lu, which is why I had avoided it until now) However, in a lot of ways, the star of this team ended up being CM BM, which when paired with Incin/Amoong/Bronzong, became a huge threat. I also thought that Hex as the last slot on Bronzong was very cute, since it hit Ursaluna-Hisui (post-tera) quite hard, which would otherwise be a big issue mon for the team.
Week 9 vs srvoltmike (W) -----
I waffled quite a lot on what to bring, and wanted to make sure I was quite solid into TR (which did end up coming), and decided on Seed Heatproof Sinistcha, which ended up having an insane matchup (which I almost choked lol why did I not tera xdd). I think this set specifically is quite strong and probably worth further exploration. Rest of the team was relatively standard, and I loaded into a strong MU.
That was it for SCL, I was extremely happy with my play overall, as besides for the mike and the last few turns of the zee game, I played extremely clean all season long. I actually felt I loaded into mostly bad matchups across the season (although shored it up a bit at the end), but almost every team I brought had enough playing power that even in negative matchups, I was able to navigate and outplay. Overall, I think all of these teams were up to standard, and I can recommend taking any of them, but probably my favorites are from Weeks 2/5/8. Now we can move to my Tier List for SV DOU right now.
And to give a quick overview of how I separated things, Tiers 1-4 are ordered, and Tier 5 is just a dump of most of the rest of the mons that I think deserve at least a shoutout. To me, Tier 1 are the meta defining Pokemon, both when it comes to in-game performance as well as how well much they impact teambuilding. I think all of the Pokemon in this tier are able to fit on multiple archetypes and define the tier as a whole right now. Incin/Wellspring (and Ghold) are all not really controversial picks, so let me talk a bit about the picks I included (or didn't include) in Tier 1 for a second. I think this was mostly the Roaring Moon tournament, with it being a mon that US West has believed in for a while, I think some personal bias does exist, but Moon is easily the Tailwind setter that provides the most to balance teams, and often serves as a balance breaker due to it enabling one of the other pieces on the team to become a lot more threatening. It's hard to remove with limited fairy coverage, and fighting types all generally hating breaking swipe (and dragons not being a safe switchin for the same reason). Since it benefits a lot from tera - while not being reliant on it, and fast knock off is so good for a lot of different special attackers, and it has good matchups into a lot of the other top tier mons, I think it deserves it's place in Tier 1. Lando is the next mon to discuss, and although it performed somewhat poorly in SCL, I still believe it to be the best mon to enable, due to ground being such a strong offensive type, esp due to its ability to pair well with other offensive types like Flying/Ice/Fairy/Fire/Rock/Poison, and while not all of those are super notable in the current meta, having a strong Ground type allows for a lot of offensive flexibility. Lastly, probably my most controversial pick in Tier 1 is Glimmora, and I think this mon is just insane for how strong of a mon it is in the builder, even though it has mediocre matchups into a lot of the top mons, its presence in the tier heavily warps what is good/bad and it still has a lot of options past its most obvious SR setting set, even within its SR set, the option of spiky vs ep vs power gem vs sludge etc. all gives a lot of uncertainty, and we also saw during this SCL, tera flying auto winning a game on turn 1. While I wouldn't fault anyone for putting Glimm in Tier 2, I personally feel that it has Tier 1 impact as a pokemon.
Moving to Tier 2, the most notable mons that you might expect to see in Tier 1 are probably Pao and Iron Hands. Pao, while still great, has taken a real hit due to Moon's popularity and success, it had a poor SCL and its biggest strength - trading well into genies, is less important in a moon meta, where it cannot OHKO with ice moves (after swipe) while getting severely hampered by both Tailwind and swipe from moon. Additionally, it still maintains a poor matchup into Incin, who has continued to rise as a inarguable top 2 mon in the tier. I think in Hands' case, it has a large competitor now in Okidogi, which fulfills a lot of the same roles on a team (i.e fighting, weak to lando etc.), but I feel that Dogi is overall better, esp due to its great matchup into incin which hands cannot claim. Although hands has still seen good success this SCL (deserving of Tier 2 placement), it clearly is not on the same level as mons like Incin as a support mon, and with more competition from Dogi as a fighting type, I believe Tier 2 is the right placement for it. Most of Tier 2 doesn't need too much explanation, but will quickly call out that Amoonguss is much higher than it's current usage might suggest. I still fundamentally believe that this mon is very strong and has very strong partners in the current meta, and importantly also is good into Glimmora. I think notably Amoonguss' viability will somewhat ebb and flow if people don't respect it's usage, Spore in TR becomes an insane button (basically a 100% accurate OHKO move). It's current usage is so low that you basically don't see Safety Goggles at all, thus it is a broken ass mon. Small note, I think Diancie is the best overall TR setter, which makes it very valuable, and rock being a strong offensive type to pair with other types allows for a good amount of flexibility. Sini also has risen up a lot in the past few months, and is part of the reason we see less Amoonguss (altho they don't do the same thing, they can be somewhat analogous), and part of that is the ability to set TR while also having redirection, being a jack of all trades support mon, however it is somewhat held back by 4MSS and its poor mu into incin.
In tier 3, I've put mons that can be on successful top tier teams, but need heavy support or are conditional on a lot of relevant conditions being met (or enable a lower level archetype). For example, I think Ting Lu can be very powerful on many teams but is often requiring either Gouger (Howl) or Rilla (Seed) to enable it. I think Snow has fallen off a bit, but is still powerful enough to warrant a Tier 3 placement, notably with Kyurem seeing a lot of usage off of snow, I still don't see it as Tier 2 in terms of impact due to its best matchup (genies) falling off a bit, and Gholdy rising a lot this tournament. Rilla still finds its place in the meta due to Seed being extremely powerful, but its poor matchups into all the top mons not named Wellspring makes it a lot less appealing in general. A surprise mon to see so low for many is Torn, but as I outlined earlier, Roaring Moon has a significant advantage in the 1v1, and a lot of Torn's good matchups have started to fall off in favor of mons that already have favorable matchups into it (i.e Rilla in the former, and Bronzong/Moltres in the latter). And now to Moltres, who also quietly had a huge appearance this tournament, it benefits a lot from high Sini usage and also has a strong place on a number of different slower archetypes, most notably Lost Box and Snow. Bronzong has also emerged as a great enabler for TR teams that want a better option into Lando.
In tier 4, I've put mostly niche mons that require you to have a read on your opponent to bring. They might have significant strengths like solo'ing specific archetypes but also have significant weaknesses. For example, Iron Crown/Indd struggle heavily into double dark and especially Ting Lu teams, which have risen in usage enough to not really consider them a strong archetype anymore. Again, these mons can still be successful in the right situations, but you need a specific read on the opponent to consider them, rather than them being generically strong. And in this same vein, I've put Chi Yu and Raging Bolt, which some people might be surprised about, however these mons have continued to struggle in a meta that has been very hostile to them, with top mons like Lando, Moon, Incin, Pao all being troublesome for them. Chi Yu struggles to actually justify a teamslot over incin (despite different roles) due to its same defensive profile making it a hard mon to include on not HO teams, which Chi Yu centered HO teams don't have ideal strong partners. Bolt is in a similar position, especially with torn being down in usage, its hard to justify as a setup mon, and its offense sets being very situational to needing specific conditionals to be met. Special shoutout here to Lost Box, I held it to Tier 4 just because I believe the team can be hard to play and so putting them any higher wouldn't be representative of the meta, however I believe the archetype could easily be considered Tier 2 in my eyes.
Also special mention for Espathra, I think this mon could potentially even be like Tier 2 impact, but with it being discovered so late into SCL, I'm unsure what it's exact impact is so leaving it in Tier 4 for now, since the tech options to beat it are relatively easy to come by and if you include any tech option it instantly loses the game (while not even being an autowin if you dont have the tech options).
Finally in Tier 5, these are fringe mons that I wouldn't consider to be good enough to bring to a SCL level match, unless many many conditional are met -- for example if they are a perfect cteam to a specific variation of an archetype your opponent likes (i.e lets say amoonguss incin waterpon diancie with no way of dealing with Kommo-o). Although these mons can still win on a lower level or if specific conditional are met, I would generally say they are fringe meta enough that you shouldn't look at them for teambuilding unless you really know what you are doing.
Note: there are mons that I did not include at all on this list, and I think they can be functionally Tier 5, but in this case, still wouldn't consider them good enough for general use. My philosophy on tiers is that everything can be considered within a half tier of each other or so (so for example if you consider Pao Tier 1, and Glimm tier 2, or Ursa Tier 2 and Bronzong Tier 3, that is perfectly acceptable in my opinion), and that difference can be attributed to personal preference, so keep that in mind.
I'm late. Very late. After a whole month of recharge I'm finally ready to talk about Akaru and I's SCL season, and what a season it was... I haven't prepped this intensively for a tournament on smogon since DWCOP 2024 but it definitely paid off in our results. Despite Akaru's previous records, my inexperience with a tour of this level and a whole list of family guy funny moments that got in the way of our prep we managed to make finals and have Akaru finish with a record of 5-5, a final record I take great pride in having supported, surpassing everybody's low expectations placed on us and mid-season circumstances beyond parody as a combined 6k draft slot. The last 6 months of DOU have seen the most rapid, radical metagame development in the tier since the last DLC and I have so much to say about it that I will be forking off a part of this post into a proper VR analysis here but as for this post I'll be dumping every team I built for this tournament which includes recreations of over half the teams used by everyone else in the tour and as a bonus I will be dumping the teams from Feyy 's excellent run and providing some of my insight into what went on with him and srvoltmike 's slot, as they were great testing allies and I gave feedback on a ton of their teams (although not as much as Eragon did). Finally, we will be counting down Akaru Kokuyo 's top 10 excuses for missing prep times, a list that was much harder to pick out than I can put into words but would be completely remiss not to do given how much he turned our channel into a telenovela.
Prep, Panic, and Practice
At the beginning of 2025 I had set my sights on Orchestrating a solid circuit run for playoffs this year. I wanted to chase down a similar feeling to winning the Natdex doubles circuit even if it only meant just reaching the playoffs at all. I had no conception that I might be drafted in SCL this year, nor did I really try to angle for it or any of the major teamtours for that matter. WelI ended up co-managing a Derby team with Gen-one and by summer seasonal I had good confidence I had secured a circuit invite for the end of the year so I began focusing on prep in the summer with baby steps. I made a team folder that compiled all of the teams I had in my builder at the time that I had considered to be excellent (current paste now including a few more modern teams). I was going to observe the DPL metagame closely and start building a deeper understanding of top teams people were running at the time. Well I ended up playing XY in DPL and finding out my gameplay was very below standard for what I expected of myself, so I started to focus on XY for a bit.
August came and went as did DPL and I was at a bit of a low point morale-wise, although my goal for the end of the year was on track I had realized a lot of that had come from prep rather than play, but if I really wanted to compete I needed both. I was very frustrated and didn't really know what to do to improve. But then, on the last day of August I got a funny little DM that changed the next 4 months of my pokemon career.
I knew almost immediately what he was getting at, and somehow I managed to sell myself despite panicking at the opportunity a bit.
The next day I saw myself drafted into a teamtour I had never intended to play and only signed up for to react farm for the seasonal likeshop with a box full of technology and a burning desire to punch up out of my weight class.
I went into week 1 wanting to prove ourselves by bringing something so optimized that the level of meta optimization itself would be surprising given Akaru's reputation as a team recycler and mine as a cheeser. I didn't know if bagel's team would be privy to the fact that I would be the primary builder of our duo, something Akaru and I had long established in our dynamic back in NDPL 2024, so I tried to use that ambiguity to our advantage as well. Going into SCL I knew that I would have to be putting in a lot of prep effort and that Akaru's availability would be spotty all throughout (how little I truly knew) so i took it upon myself to run a scout of every tour game bagel had played in the past year and saw he only had 2 diancie, 2 iron crown and no Ursaluna uses throughout the year, mostly relying on genies stuff and snow. I quickly landed on using icy wind pao, something novel to my scout and something with a lot of stock put into it going into week 1 of SCL. I quickly found glimmora was very well suited to abusing the speed interactions off pao and that moon fit nicely as back up tailwind, with wellspring hands as the de-facto good stuff guys for filling balance niches in the tier. This team originally had a Gholdengo on it as the set up win condition but the very first test game I got with the team I played against eragon who was using the exact same pao-glimm core but with Volcarona over Gholdengo. I shamelessly lifted his idea with his permission, getting his EV spread and micro-optimizing the team from there.
We were very satisfied with initial tests of this team so as prep week went on I began to work on another team for potential later use while waiting for Akaru to finally have test time to iron out the kinks of the team. I built out a Kingambit-Regidrago team that tried to remove the setup aspect of gambit for more immediate power, we never did end up using it though. After waiting all of prep week for akaru to have time to voice call to run over the team, discord's voice hosting services died on us and interfered with our prep day, but we managed to work out lines and micro-optimizations for the team (see screenshots below). The team was notably weak to ursaluna so even though it was out of scout we devised a specifc gameplan into ursaluna snow teams that was generally applicable to trick room as a whole that ended up saving the whole week by giving akaru a solid plan into the team Bagel actually ended up bringing. I changed glimmora to tera flying, arguing that sash preservation into ground types was probably better than just being a funny resist and it ended up saving the game into Bagel. We also made hands grass tera for another ground resist option, given the team's notable lack of immunities into Landorus and Amoonguss. Despite a scuffed VC and a flooding city Akaru managed to find good prep time and ended up capitalizing on a few minor mistakes bagel made in the midgame with solid play and good time control for a clean win to kick off our season, a mighty successful week and one of our best loads.
Despite all that our prep went very well, and we figured out a few lines for Snow. Most of our good weeks' prep looked like this.
A few other team notes, Pao icy wind + modest Glimmora Power gem gets the KO on max Hp lando-i or ratpacker lando-i most of the time. Heavy Slam Iron hands is mandatory for the diancie matchup, it's pretty abysmal otherwise and ice punch is very useful for this team as a backup option into landorus from a disadvantaged board. Tera Steel seemed to be the best tera type on Volcarona, allowing it to be significantly more reliable into paonite comps and providing a rock resist tera in a pinch and allowing Volc to overpower Regidrago and CM Bolt, though it does leave volcarona particularly vulnerable to fire types. U-turn on ogerpon gives the team an easy way to self-proc toxic spikes off glimmora and offers a much-wanted positional tool for a rather stiff team with two sash users. Icy pao synergizes well with glimmora on lead but also gives you nasty endgame potential with tera wellspring, Glimmora can also be replaced with lando-I if you prefer that combo off icy pao. Icy wind pao was really the main call of this team into bagel and defines the pace it operates at pretty effectively.
After winning week 1 I wanted to stick to the same idea of building solid so we could gain momentum into the rest of the season using some more exotic choices and counterpicks. Luckily Madaraaa's scout was very inspiring, having a staggeringly low Incineroar userate of 12% for the whole year and no bolt usage at all. I quickly identified Moltres-Galar as a stable win-con that could exploit Madaraaa's low amount of fake out disruption and reliance on special hitters, and we quickly ended up with one of the best teams I've ever built in this format. A lot of people have asked me for this team or recreated it in some form but I don't think I've seen too many people quite crack the code with it as there's a few extremely important build and playstyle decisions that were made with it and a few weaknesses that need to be properly played around for it to feel truly great. Luckily I had a lot of time and motivation to perfect this team, being a fan of moltres long before this tournament as asturdy wincon that can stand up to genies and ghold exceptionally well.
The first thing I want to talk about is the Moltres set itself: the spread, Tera Fire and Leftovers. When building this team I wanted to really emphasize Moltres' longevity potential into Madara, capable of trading up with a vast array of pokemon off its great special bulk, good phys bulk and broken signature move. Leftoves allows Moltres to sit far longer than sitrus berry while being less reliant on sinistcha for longevity, sini can still provide burst healing to fish for additional Berserk procs but fundamentally Moltres wants to sit, click Plot and sweep and I wanted this team to enable it as much as possible. Incineroar is one of the best support partners in the game for sinistcha with a naturally complimentary typing and piles on damage mitigation for moltres to play with, and Moon provides more damage mitigation and tailwind to facilitate a harder sweep. This was the supportive core I determined was optimal into Madara, not threateaned as much as screen setters might be into chi-yu and other HO options but still providing excellent mitigation for Molt. I had full confidence in this core as a builder and from there it was a matter of problem testing. I ended up putting Specs ghold on the team to assist with opposing Ice, Rock and Fairy types and act as another fighting switch-in for the triple dark core, specs tera dazzling gleam also acted as a great removal tool for opposing dark types. With so much support around the moltres I found myself ripping tera fairy almost as often as tera on moltres, with the exception cases being versus setup hearthflame and snow, seeing as Moltres had no incentive to tera in genies matchups or Psyspam/fullroom. Both Crit and Swords Dance Hearthflame were very annoying in test games as there was only one fire removing piece on the team in Ursaluna (or early on, landorus) so we put on tera fire for moltres to be able to stonewall it and sweep in peace, it ended up being very useful versus snow with +spdef moltres not really fearing non-stab earth power from kyurem at all.
With Moltres not having a way to tera out of its rock weakness having a rock resist for a ground type became important, and Bloodmoon quickly replaced what was once a Landorus slot as an actual rock resist. Bloodmoon paired with Ghold to dispatch Glimmoras and Diancies and packed Vacuum Wave to snipe Paos since I noticed Pao-Wellspring could muscle through this team if positioned at the right time. As testing continued despite Akaru claiming to be kidnapped multiple times we came to realize this team's only truly annoying matchups were Tera Fairy wincons in CM Primarina, CM spect and Bolt, the exact matchups we intended to sacrifice. Knock off and parting utility with Specs ghold meant the team could probably handle it, so we saw fit to ship it. I realized after SCL it would be very easy to substitute physical ursaluna for Bloodmoon and make Incineroar tera flying, making the team a bit more positionally reliant and slightly more pao-weak but fixing these matchups and evening out the damage split of the team quite effectively. Finishing notes: turbo fast incineroar felt apporpriate to really assert fake-out dominance as this team needs to move around a bit with incin to maintain steady progress, +2 116 SpA Moltres-Galar Air Slash vs. 252 HP / 0 SpD Ogerpon-Wellspring: 374-444 (102.7 - 121.9%) -- guaranteed OHKO. Fast Incin wisp is important as an option for vs clam users and especially dogi, Life dew Sini felt appropriate as every other mon on the team can hit ghold hard and the team has no issues with bronzong, so adding another dimension to healing goltres was quite useful, Power Gem on Ghold was a useful emergency tool for hitting fires a bit harder since this team does struggle a bit with that type.
Akaru managed to only miss a record one day of the week so when it came to gameday he was extremely familiar with the team and got to play a very positive matchup, even if it wasn't quite the style we were expecting from Madara.
2-0, spirits high and momentum in our favor, this was our week to lose. Ratpacker's scout was rather sparse despite the high amount of activity he has in SV, but it was tending towards bulky stuffs not too dissimilar to our own load from week 2. I figured he would try to load hands/dogi into us given the state of SCL at the time and tried to build out from there. Unfortunately I had a 1000 mile road trip to take this week and had to spend the first day of the week building EPL versus enzonana. (This team ended up being WAY better than what i produced for SCL this week, I probably should have saved it for this tour) I tried thinking of Ideas in the car between driving shifts and ended up with a bunch of early mediocre builds.
Search these pastes if you dare
I had declined Akaru's offer to produce ideas for this week and now on Wednesday I realized my brief absence was going to be an issue, especially since sleeping in the car would not be very comfortable. Akaru was busy a fair bit through the week so we quickly ended up at Friday afternoon with no tests done and nothing but half-baked teams to start working on. We spent the next few hours trying stuff and ended up taking a decent liking to the Kommo Psyspam team. However as I started finalizing the team Akaru opted out of further test games, saying his gameplay had been poor all day so we deferred to getting proper reps in on Saturday. Well Saturday came and went and we got no test games in, I heard back from Akaru Sunday morning and it turned out his city had flooded *again*
So it was Sunday, we had minimal testing outside of me optimizing the sets through my own games, but Akaru hadn't quite built up comfort with this janky team that, while it did look good into ratpacker's scout would admittedly need some finesse to play optimally with. Between icy wind pao, trick room indeedee and tailwind volc I knew this team had extremely good tools to maintain speed control, and triple redirection was just absurd setup for kommo/crown to sweep. Throat chop pao next to wellspring could also make for a decent endgame cleaning duo. Volcarona provided insurance into Ghold while acting as a pivot/sacrificial piece for this kind of team to position well and SBall deedee was more insurance.
16+ SpA Volcarona Overheat vs. 248 HP / 24 SpD Gholdengo: 426-504 (112.9 - 133.6%) -- guaranteed OHKO
Ultimately when we got to the game ratpacker was able to play solidly and leverage snarl bolt versus the crown, Akaru never quite found the advantage board he needed to start cleaning the game out, I think with a little more time this team could have been more optimized, or Akaru could have been more comfortable on it but given circumstance I wasn't too upset with how the week turned out, though I did take note to account for Akaru's comfort with the teams a bit more.
Special shoutout to akaru randomly calling pao chienpeso all during this week, was very funny to read when scrolling back on logs.
I was still feeling alright despite the loss from the previous week, but something cracked as pressure to continue performing highly began to set in a bit. With Fey and Mike being 1-2 and one of the only squads I didn't feel like we had to punch up into I wanted to take this week as a chance to fill our scout with something more exotic in preparation for later weeks to make counterteaming us harder. The problem was I had no idea what to run into these two. Mike's scout was littered with Bronzong and DWCOP/Derby teams I had assisted with and Fey's scout was extremely minimal, a strange combination that made it incredibly challenging to bring something when I'm trying to avoid building standard goodstuffs. On top of this I know srvoltmike , this motherfucker is one of the most tenacious players on the site and can NEVER be counted out of a tour match no matter the circumstance, and Fey may was well be the Steph Curry of draft who dooms his games so often that being down in the season doesn't seem to really affect him as much as other players. All this to say I ended up stressing and having builder block coming out of the loss to ratpacker, but I was determined to produce a solid team by the end of the week.
Eventually I ended up deciding on a Chi-Yu load, inspired to try out sash Lando-T after reminding myself of that set from BW and realizing it cleared the 302 benchmark a lot of pokemon were starting to hit. Lando-T offered a solid pivot around opposing Lando-I and a good rocks option for Chi-yu while outputting decent damage next to it and compressing intimidate since I didn't intend to use moon again this week. fast taunt also ended up winning a lot of test games off the get-go. I subconsciously ended up nearly copying a ratpacker structure he had tested into me, where he used Clefable instead of clefairy and levered Moonblast's damage into the dragons next to Chi-Yu.
Akaru noted the structure felt a little stiff but wasn't anything he couldn't test out of, we had a very solid proven back core of wellspring hands torn with the Chi-yu half and a solid matchup spread with a good zong matchup. He did make some **interesting** changes though.
We had a few quiet days after that, I had a few errands to run IRL and i assumed akaru would focus in his own time, though he did have some issues..
Despite this I was very confident in this team and knew it was good enough to win. Come gameday I think we had a fine matchup, Chi-Yu could make a lot of progress into the opposing snow team with a single turn of setup and landorus rocks got good value overall. unfortunately Akaru opted out of Fake Out turn 1 and got his Hands burned and avoided bringing in Chi-Yu until far too late in the game. He was concerned about bringing in Chi-Yu on a parting shot, thinking he wouldn't have enough damage output at+1 to break down the opposing team's Iron Hands despite tera ghost and clefairy being able o prevent hands from healing much. This miscalculation unfortunately meant that Akaru never created enough pressure to break down the snow team's hands and out win condition was underutilized in the game. The Akaru would reconcile this fact later, and I resolved to ensure we had more thorough testing in future weeks since Akaru's unfamiliarity with the matchup cause him to doubt the strength of the team and lose.
Going into this week Akaru and I knew SEA to be a balance merchant, and looking at the SCL scout of team Eragon had built for her and her DPL scout we decided to use some anti-balance strategies this week in the form of Kingambit. I wanted to leverage the fact that we had hardly ever loaded Kingambit in anything with gambit's incredible capacity to prey upon balance teams to catch SEA off-guard in prep and in gameplay. I wanted to recover Akaru's confidence in our builder so early drafts of teams for the week looked a lot more solid than what we would eventually end up loading gameday, trying to leverage SS style mew-lando balance teams with gambit rather than going the torn speed control route, using psychic noise on mew to disable hands/okidogi drain punch for Kingambit. Grass Spam Gambit Icy Pao Mew Gambit
After some early test rounds I changed dnite to moon on the first team, but still wasn't really satisfied so I started bouncing around ideas a lot. Akaru was super busy "I left the house at 6am and only just got back at 8pm" so I got a bit unfocused in builder for the first few days of this week. Eventually late Wednesday I abandoned the mew idea and thought to go back to an older idea I had with gambit + coaching sneasler with toxic spikes to punish balance even further. Sneasler's close combat greatly punishes incineroar for gambit as well and it's unmatched fake out seed tier enables very easy setup, poison stab can also remove Ogerpons to clear the way for sucker punch on gambit. To pair with toxic spikes I added calm mind sinistcha, a fantastic wincon in its own right capable of holding the board hostage for a dozen turns or more with its absurd healing capacity, and another pokemon capable of preying upon balance comps and holding Lando-I hostage for gambit-sneasler. Icy wind Torn and AV Ursaluna further rounded out the fire and Lando-I matchups, and I just threw Incineroar on for positional capabilities. After I ran some test games myself I began bugging Akaru to play with the team, though he was kind of dead after working for 14 hours XD. Random Enamorus Team I made while waiting for Akaru to test with the team
Eventually Akaru got games in and took to liking the calm mind Sinistcha wincon, though he noted some minor issues for the team.. At some point we removed toxic spikes for dire claw, which unfortunately would have been phenomenal in the actual game.
Well come gameday SEA loaded exactly that, though not quite Swords Dance. Akaru got gambit setup fairly freely early on off SEA trying to figure out positioning around the team, but as the battle dragged on SEA made ground back until akaru missed a sucker opportunity and Gambit got KOed. I personally felt that Sinistcha had an amazing matchup, with only one grass resist in the opposing team and the fire type being a special attacker, sini had a lot of potential to run the game over if it got a few boosts, but it never quite came to that and now we had lost three weeks in a row. We did some reflection and debate before we both went to bed, Akaru woke up the next day and had the following to say
Akaru spent the next few weeks helping various people he and his family knew with home renovations, and he let me know in advance that he would be entirely unavailable the following week as he would be going to a family friend's place to help with hurricane damages. Thankfully I already knew I wanted to go back to solid stuffs for real this time so we kept prep simple with a few early pastes and tried to focus down solving grassy seed Gholdengo since I recognized its potential to stuff Incin/Moon Knock Off counterplay, and those were really the main Gholdengo checks in Ann's scout. In natdex I had recently been playing with Gholdengo + snarl/webs Zeraora and it felt incredible, so I was really fixated on having a snarl clicker next to Gholdengo this week; or secondary speed control. Snarl Moon with Seed Ghold Diancie Snarl moon with AV swipe Kyurem
Both of these early revisions centered around Grassy Seed Ghold not really needing intimidate to cover for its phys side, and instead loaded up on the Tang core of Hearthflame-Lando-Moon to exert pressure and make progress until ghold could finally plant itself to win the game. While strong teams, I felt in practice games that both could struggle to find pins on opposing builds unless Ghold was already out, leaving a decent play burdon that I felt I could still remove. I wanted the slot that housed diancie/kyurem on both of these teams to still be positive into Tornadus, given the dual grass core and ghold being unable to switch out freely meaning that icy wind off torn would be able to get significant long-term value. The solution to both problems was Glimmora and just putting swipe back on moon to force out annoyances, but how was I going to fit my extra speed control/snarl that I was fixating on? Then I realized, I could just turn Rillaboom into diet zeraora.
Rillaboom @ Assault Vest
Ability: Grassy Surge
Tera Type: Fire
EVs: 240 HP / 16 Atk / 132 SpD / 120 Spe
Adamant Nature
- Fake Out
- Drum Beating
- Snarl
- U-turn
With this set, Rillaboom could provide significantly more utility compression for Gholdengo without sacrificing the rest of the team's breaking synergy, and Hearthflame could help provide Grass damage on its own. I made the Rillaboom very SpDef invested to be able to tank 2 Bleakwind Storms or a Sludge Bomb and then a -1 Sludge Bomb from lando-I with enough speed to get over -1 Tornadus. I finally had the compression I was looking for with the sustained pressure Glimmora provided to break down opposing teams. Akaru loved it, and we shipped it pretty much as-was. This team ended up winning over Ann in a fine game, but I was mostly just glad we could recenter our building and be solid.
With Akaru gone for the week and Zee having the big funni run, I wanted to build something as comfortable as possible, but that wasn't what happened at first. In my off-time from the week before I had taken my zera-ghold fixation and pushed it to its logical conclusion in SV with a pokemon that was as close to a 1-1 replacement for zeraora as possible, Alolan persian. Just fast enough to cut it in this metagame, and just bulky enough off its ability to live a few hits, I took the funny fake out mon and built a genies ghold rain team around it, and it tested incredibly well for a few days, So well that I decided I wanted to run it into Zee for a most of the week. However, I just wasn't quite 100% confident with it. genies ghold was an outdated archetype at this point, and the genies themselves were super volatile pokemon costing me a few test games every so often just by missing storm moves. While positioning was very easy with the team, I could find myself not always having the output to beat tera wellspring or Av Kyurem as well. The team could generally handle just about anything with better play and nothing going unlucky, but was I really going to leave my only real SCL game up to chance and the potential that I might fully outclass the player who's on the run of their life? I didn't have the confidence, so I loaded up our week 2 team with tera fairy blast on the Moltres to attempt to exploit Zee's heavy use of fairy-weak bruisers, and punish Zee's utter disrespect for moltres as a pokemon.
When I think about the game, I think about the adrenaline surge. No nerves just raw energy. The type of energy I bring when competing in Wild Rift tournaments or sports once upon a time. Go time. I lead Moon and Gholdengo, with ghold being able to make progress into the team regardless of what zee leads, and moon being able to cover bronzong/sinistcha early with knock and stay active with swipe to prevent a clean in for ursaluna and not really caring to preserve booster for later. I past encounters Zee has tended to play defensive early into me, and given the lead they put out, I couldn't really see wellspring staying in. I knock and gleam for chip, holding tera to not commit too early and let ghold become fake out fodder. Turn 2 I decide to make a risky play, anticipating zee to continue pushing for a positional advantage rather than puishing my current board fully, I take the gleam damage on bolt and bring out Incin on moon to be able to contest board position. The play works but bolt crits the ghold, who I would possibly need to defeat Bronzong later if moltres didn't find space to get set up. Turn 3 I decide that rather than preserve ghold I could use the sacrifice to get Moltres in safely, with Incineroar on the field to get Zee's Sinistcha low with Blitz, but to my surprise Zee protects the bolt and switches to wellspring, which gets KOed by a crit from flare blitz, a huge gain for me allowing me to use incineroar much more freely for the rest of the game. You can win. Turns 4 and 5 end up being a positional scramble, until we end up with both ursas on the field and moltres staring down sinistcha. They're faltering, faster. My gut tells me to Bloodmoon the ursaluna slot and fiery wrath, but I don't go with my instinct. My mind is telling me to remove the sinistcha and deny trick room, "Ursaluna should make a defensive play". I was wrong and we trade Moltres for Sinistcha. With moltres down, preserving the 10% hp gholdengo in the back has become incredibly important, and I start rushing. faster. I Spam hyper voice for a few turns as Bronzong eventually sets up trick room, burning tera to do so. Turn 9. 22% Hp ursaluna and a half heath bronzong staring at my Bloodmoon and incineroar, no tera on the board for Zee.
252+ SpA Ursaluna-Bloodmoon Vacuum Wave vs. 248 HP / 8 SpD Ursaluna: 118-140 (25.4 - 30.2%) -- 100% chance to KO
You blew it.
I don't click it. I completely overlook my priority move and swap sinistcha in for incin, expecting Bloodmoon to live the double-up. Had I stopped to calc it I would have realized there was zero chance of that actually happening. An entirely preventable blunder that would cost me the game all because in the heat of the moment I forgot about a move that I was signing the praises of in doubles cord a year ago.
Esm's Scout had an insane lack of gholdengo throughout the year, and I felt inclined to exploit that somehow. Akaru wanted to load dogi + dengo, and I built out a team for that idea early in the week here. Had we loaded this team we probably would have had an even matchup in this week.
I posted Meteor Beam Deoxys with Chi-yu, something fast to exploit esm's tendency for setup and this ended up being the team Akaru liked the most from the batch I had whipped up this week. Psychic noise followed up on our thread from week 5 and still seemed like a good option in this metagame with leech pon and drain punch users running around. We tinkered on it throughout the week without much issue, akaru and I both won a lot of test games. We made landorus bulky tera steel, wekkspring play rough, decided not to put a ghold-hitting move on our cloak dogi and took rocks off deoxys in favor of flash cannon for the diancie matchup. While te team tested very well, I did note that deoxys + chi-yu lead was particularly vulnerable to fake out + field setup, and generally the team had a problem with trick room. So esm loaded trick room bronzong + gholdengo. Akaru got his dogi burned and Chi-yu KOed by turn 2 and the game was over quite quickly. I left the team was bad prep + bad matchup and didn't think about it too much, easily the least eventful week of the tour and I really don't have much to say about the team itself unlike our other teams that lost.
Having not loaded paonite all season and with our team locked for playoffs, I knew immediately I wanted to diversify our scout and it looked reasonably solid into nails' brand of off-kilter offense and bruiser teams. I lifted eragon 's "broken av pao spread" realizing we wanted ruination and icy wind on the team for control and threw on AV primarina for FWG/fantasy core synergy with the paonite gouger core. Band rillaboom + icy pao did phenomenal for me in EPL and I saw fit to run it here with Seed ghold to break setup and break down physical walls, with multiscale dnite for tailwind. Kind of strange but definitely a good team with all your essential tools to make paonite succeed. We kept this idea throughout the entire week and iterated upon it a bunch, though Akaru didn't get too many test games in because of world cup but other than that, another quiet week. In the actual game dragonite lost hte coinflip to hit 5/5 scale shots and just barely failed to KO nails' cress on turn 1, immediately throwing Akaru off his game and resulting in a rather fast loss versus cressbear sun. With the week not mattering and still coming down from the previous two weeks, there really wasn't too much more to say here.
During this week Akaru asked me to give him a team for XY in ORASPL vs Singlethunder, so I loaned him some Tyranitar Balance to punish her Zard sun usage with funni steel wing on mence to hit mega diancie for the team. Sorry your Diancie got steel winged turn 1 ST!
I started the week by asking akaru what his current favorite SV teams were, and he gave me snowbolt hearthflame, dengo setup offense and diancie grass spam. I though back to our initial scout of madaraaa and recalled how solid Ting-lu generally looked into him, with a good winrate when loaded by others. It was here I combined akaru's tendencies with what looked good into madaraaa's scout and realized I could bring back Grassy seed Ting-lu, a set I had labbed out way back in doubles world cup 4 in a replay that is now lost to time after shitposting in eragon's dms.
Between leftovers and grassy terrain, ting lu ability and dual breaking swipe, ghold would have plenty of room to set up, but ting lu itself would be incredibly difficult to remove and gouging fire howl is always a dangerous wincon in its own right. Wellspring felt like a better add here than pao, giving ghold a redirector while checking landorus for gouger and still benefitting from the howl boosts. This team was nuts, it didn't drop a test game to anything except mortal spin glimmora and pecharunt, two equally mickey pokemon. Body press on ting lu made this team a nightmare for incineroar to slow down, OHKOing it with tera and ignoring intimidate. Wisp Incin would simply leave ting free to set rocks and, on some versions, spam whirlwind as incin can't really fit wisp and taunt together. Snow teams struggled to do enough damage to ghold through terraina dn Ting lu passive, and hated dealing with ruination + rocks and gouger endgames while landorus teams struggled to break past double grass + knock moon ting. Psyspam is practically an autowin with this team and trick room teams don't appreciate how well ting lu sits on them and underspeeds ursaluna. It felt like a team made to take down almost anything but especially Madaraaa's scout.
Akaru liked the team and felt confident in his play after we vod reviewed early in the week, I gave him some lines into glimmora and felt extremely confident when we loaded into battle. Ting-Lu clicked tera fighting body press and 6-0ed madaraaa's team, looking more like a restricted pokemon than a normal legendary. This team didn't really show too much in the game and I ended up spamming it a bunch during DLT laddering session to great success, I highly recommend it to anyone looking to put ting-lu in their builder. We ended up tying this week with our team going to tiebreaks, impeccable timing as Akaru had another funny moment going into finals, giving way to the format of this megapost.
Inspiration struck very early this week, wanting to punish the bulky stuff sea had been loading all tour, I immediately decided on glimmora and looked for ways to punish okidogi since it was the only poison other than a single pecharunt they had loaded.
I typed in every psychic move in the game and scrolled the showdown builder until I found this:
With Akaru having also brought it up before, I knew it was destiny to load Psychic Kyurem
Psychic Kyurem immediately goobed bagel in a test game (Thank you, by the way for testing so much with us throughout the season, I'm pretty sure I got more games with you than I did with Akaru or any of my friends, and your loads helped broaden my metagame perspective a lot.) and we realized that we hadn't loaded snow for the entire tour. I ended up making the Kyurem life orb to break down SEA's defensive cores of choice faster, noting that tera ground pushed earth power to OHKO sample gholdengo. The team itself was the tried and true fangame ursaluna snow + 1 core, with Offensive AV incin to punish ghold more and roar A9 to play off toxic spikes and deny opposing setup. Flying incin/glimm to pair with earthquake ursaluna better, and shadow ball on sinistcha for bronzong counterplay.
Akaru was by all means available throughout the week despite his trolling, until he ended up finding an injured stray cat that he so kindly nursed back to good health
Don't worry, the cat ended up being alright. Akaru's a professional cat lover after all.
Testing went very well, the team was solid if a little fishy, but every set on the team was within reason and we were strongly confident that we had our scout in order. SEA loaded lostbox sun, which may have had an alright time into the snow component but had a truly dreadful matchup into incineroar glimmora. Akaru was able to side-proc his toxic spikes very early and roar ninetales was able to seal the deal by refusing to let bronzong set up until all its friends were dead. In the end akaru finished the season 5-5, not bad for a 3k starter slot and a 3k support slot.
All told, I'm really happy I got into this tour. Akaru said he barely scraped in himself, being the secondary choice for the managers who bought him, and I only got to be his support because he wanted me after we had such a good time in 2024 NDPL. I can't imagine i would have gotten in with any other player, nor that I would have had as much fun as I did with any other player or team. I already said my fair share when the tour ended to everyone else but Akaru Kokuyo you made this tour so much fun. Every time we lost or you had a setback you greeted it with warmth and a good joke, you made me laugh even as I was burning out and I don't think I could have put so much work in this season if you weren't such an exceptionally fun person to be around. We made great teams, terrible teams, made good jokes and bad jokes, it was my favorite teamtour of 2025 and one I will always look back on fondly. I hope we get to team again soon.[/SPOILER]
I was going to provide commentary on a bunch of fey's teams but honestly after this post being bogged down for months for various reasons I kinda forgor a lot of the circumstances behind a lot of these despite having a hand refining a lot of them.
I also recreated about 60% of all teams built in SCL this year at one point or another for analysis/prep, feel free to have those recreates https://pokepast.es/5ce85eab0db0a1bd
I really wish I had it in me to do commentary on all this like I planned to but I've spent a good 30 hours typing and revising this post and scrolling discord logs (I laughed at a lot of them reading back) and this post is already 2 months late so I'll just leave it for another lifetime.
Schister has done it. And in turn, here's the post that I've promised.
The Zong Dump.
Over the last calendar year, I've dedicated myself to pushing an archetype to its absolute limit. These are some of the results.
Prolouge: Sacramento
It was the Monday following LAIC 2025 (which was actually held in November of 2024) and I had a VGC regional to go to in a week. Problem was, I didn't have a team. The prior weekend was actually the one I planned on dedicating to regional prep, but unfortunately due to life's circumstances I spent most of it at the hospital not thinking about VGC at all, but I digress. I was up talking with the Westies and trying to make heads or tails of the Reg H meta at the time, when popped up. After iteration and talking it through with the (world champion btw ) Westies, I ended up bringing this to Sacramento. The original Zong team:
This stellar team netted me a whopping 225th place at the tournament. Truly a sign for things to come.
Chapter 1: Derb.
Starting the 2025 year with the greatest tournament of all time, Doubles Derby, I was looking to ride the momentum I had from my DOU rookie year. I was drafted to the Red Spec Redemption team and was once again able to build with one of the minds of all time Schister, who was my comanager for this tournament. Week 1 i was paired into Iceberg77 who had a LOT of Lando (both T and I) in their scout, and I suggested running zong bear which I fully fleshed out with Schister's input which ended up becoming the first Bronzong team I ever used in a DOU tour:
Funny enough, the main takeaway from this team wasn't even that Zong was broken, but rather that Zong was a nice utility piece that happened to match up incredibly into genies (especially Lando) which greatly enables Ursaluna and Raging Bolt. Incin and Sinistcha were just goodstuffs pieces on the team at the time, we didn't think much of their synergy with Bronzong.
Chapter 2: Residual
This takeaway would end up showing on the second bronzong team I would build, after having a decent amount of tour success with the first. The context for this match was, I was paired against luisin for week 1 of BLT and I wanted to catch him off guard. The last time I had played him was over a year ago at the time in DOU swiss where he WIPED me. It was not close. I had nightmares. In any case, snow looked good into his scout and eragon was talking about some bundle stuff at the time, which inspired me to build the following:
Despite the loss, the team was testing great and I learned of the power of residual damage when combined with a defensive wall like set up Bronzong. You can see shades of the first team with Bolt and Bear benefitting off the benefits of the Bell. And just like that I started iterating.
Chapter 3: DPL
At this point I was kinda known as the Bronzong guy. I had by far the highest Bronzong usage in tournament among DOU tour regulars as we entered DPL. In fact, my scout was so littered with Bronzong, that I knew I had to pick and choose my battles carefully. For this tournament, I built and used two bronzong teams.
eragon and SEA are certainly no slouches. In fact, they went on later this year to grab a lil green trophy, which y'all may have seen. At this point a few things were starting to become more apparent:
1. I am pulling literal god matchups when I load bronzong. Every game seems quite favored for me.
2. Incin (especially AV adamant) and Sinistcha are a match made in heaven for Zong Bear. That core four was so insanely powerful that I don't doubt that you could get 1500s on ladder by just running those four pokemon and playing 4 on 6. Amoongus is a bit of a problem for the team but its mitigated by Ursa and Sini being spore immune and Incin threatening heavy damage on it. You can also easily fit an ogerpon onto the team no problem, which makes Amoongus cry.
3. The archetype is starting to gain popularity. This tournament saw other players experiment with their own bronzong teams, to moderate success. In fact, Ann ended up running a Bronzong team into me in semis of this very tournament, which was quite funny. It was also around this time that other genie answers really started to become popular, namely (#neverwrongjustearly) and Icy Wind Chien Pao.
Chapter 4: You really can just slap any 6th on the team
Español Premier League. What a time. It was the week before playoffs and my team was already locked so my team gave an opportunity for Eat "EatFoods" Foods to play, though she wanted to bring a Bronzong team into papiloco's scout. Also, she was ADAMANT on bringing Primarina to this matchup for vibes. Luckily, at this point I have Zong building down to a science, so I just slapped on my usual mold and let her cook. Voila! She won her match and we proved you can literally just slap any mon on that 6th slot and make the team work.
Fey and I are a dangerous combo. For the last week of SCL, Fey wanted to bench and I figured I should at least make my SCL debut, if not for shits and giggles. Funny enough, Fey was the one who came up with a power anklet Malamar next to Zong Bear Torky Eggy in TR idea, as we were both trying to see how best to make our team mascot Alolan-Exeggutor work in DOU. I ended up playing ESM in this match in what can best be described as a match of all time. I was going through some IRL stuff this week so I didn't have much time to playtest (hence why the funny was loaded):
As the year was winding down and I found myself leaning more and more on Bronzong in my tour games (as well as running into more and more counter teams), I realized that this obsession with the bell was not sustainable moving forward. Therefore, in one last blaze of glory, I decided to run mono zong in the the DOU Fall Seasonal indiv tournament to show the bell off one last time before moving forward. I built many teams each with answers to some of the common Bronzong counter strategies in an effort to not be predictable while constricting myself to this arbitrary ruleset.
Gambit > Ursa gives me a 50 speed tr abuser but with stronger matchups into sinistcha and gholdengo Brought back the original sand zong idea. This team is honestly excellent. Don't think I ever used this one in tournament. Inspired by the Marco sun VGC team By far the funniest team I made. Garg super walls gho and you can side spinner your ting lu.
I ended up placing top 6 in this tournament, a feat I am quite proud of considering how strong the players I ended up being paired into were. Unfortunately, however, in the end I couldn't bring it home one last time for the bell.
Epilogue: The Moment
I recently watched The Moment (2026), the Charli XCX brat Tour mockumentary, where a central point in the film was the "death of brat summer" and what that meant for Charli as both an artist and person, but also the external pressure from those around her to keep the moment going as long as possible (and consequently keep the money flowing as long as possible). I feel similarly tied to Bronzong as Charli was to brat. I saw through the creation of an archetype (sub-archetype?) and kept working at it to refine it as much as possible. Over the last year, Bronzong went from just some cool pokemon I remember from my first Platinum playthrough to genuinely one of my favorite mons of all time. I saw my shitmon get meaningful usage in DPL and SCL; it felt like my baby. It felt as if the archetype was a reflection of me as a player. However, it is finally time to break that link, and I do so by giving up my builder, in hopes that I won't be allowed to recycle the same archetype from here on out and to continue growing as a player.
I also want to recognize that I was not alone in this endeavor. SO MANY friends helped me theory craft, build, and test these teams. A special shout out to the Westies and those in my team tour servers this year, I definitely couldn't have done it without them.
With all that being said, I hope to see some high Bronzong usage this year in OSDT.
. His ability to inflict pain onto the metagame led him to catch the eye of doubles players around the globe, hoping to reach invitationals with him. He is, after all, the uncontested best special attacker in the tier. Sheer Power coupled with Life Orb and good coverage lets him delete meta threats like Diancie and Incineroar.
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