Intro
Hi, I'm Radio! I ended up finishing the ladder at no. 1, so I thought I'd post a short review of some of the teams I used. I started playing VGC in 2023, so my experience with the 2013 format had previously been limited to sporadic tours in the VGC chat room on Showdown. However, I’m friends with a couple people who are quite invested in the format, so I decided I would spend quite a lot of time on ladder trying to get the most of the month. To enjoy it to the fullest, I spent time with quite a few different teams, getting them all to Top 10 on ladder. Most of these teams were sourced from the poketopia discord server, which is focused on gen 4 and 5 VGC formats, so thanks to them for providing these. These will be relatively short write ups of my thoughts on using each, not a full team report.
Team 1: Enigne’s 2013 Seniors WCS Winning Team
https://pokepast.es/66ac91b065006e26
The first team I used was decided on primarily due to containing Machamp. I really wanted to see the edge cases of the format, rather than what I was already familiar with in stuff like Arash, Cybertron, and Gini’s teams. That’s not to say this team doesn’t include many of the format staples; realistically the team hinges on mons like Swords Dance Scizor and Electric Gem Rotom to control games. However, many of the more surprising item choices really make a difference in the CTS format. Leftovers + Substitute Thundurus allows you to disrupt the flow of the game far longer than people usually expect, and Psychic Gem Cresselia makes you much more threatening towards many of the Trick Room threats in the format. These techs allowed me to reach no. 1 on the ladder, but the team did feel significantly flawed.
Cresselia had both Safeguard and Swagger – while the synergy should be somewhat obvious, in practice it just never worked out for me. It was just too vulnerable to RNG. I could get Thunder Waved before Safeguard ever went up, swaggering an opponent isn’t consistent, and trying to self swagger under safeguard just took way too much set up to be reliable. Then, there was Machamp. While it did give me a free win into someone trying to run Shuckle-Chansey, it just was a weak link. It’s too slow, too frail, and wide guard sucks in gen 5 due to having a fail chance. Finally, the team doesn’t have a single electric resist. With the prevalence of various Thundurus and Rotom forms on ladder, this made playing safe a nightmare.
Overall, I’d rate this team a 6/10. It’s a legitimately powerful composition, but there are too many significant flaws.
Team 2: Personal Modification of Enigne’s Team
https://pokepast.es/c75fc5501274043d
After using Enigne’s team, I wanted to attempt my own version. I started by killing two birds with one stone: removing machamp and replacing it with an electric resist. For this, I ended up choosing Hydreigon. While not as immediately oppressive as Latios is in this format, it paired extremely well with Scizor. Running Earth Power meant I had a consistent check to Heatran to support Scizor, and Dark Gem + Bug Bite from Scizor meant I could consistently remove Cresselia with them. As for my own Cresselia, I decided to replace Swagger and Safeguard with Moonlight and Trick Room. This gave me far better speed control options than I previously had, which counterintuitively helped one of my fastest mons, Hydreigon. Since Hydreigon can’t outspeed Latios or Tornadus, two of the most common and powerful mons in the format, setting up Trick Room allowed me to beat those two consistently with a relatively fast mon. Moonlight just gave me extra sustainability, which is nice when running an aggressive item like Psychic Gem. Finally, I replaced Rotom’s HP Grass with HP Ice. I just wasn’t encountering any Gastrodons and it felt really nice to have a reliable way to hit Landorus and Grass types.
Using this team I once again reached no. 1 on ladder. I felt significantly more comfortable with it, but the match ups into Tornadus-Latios were always tense, so I would only give it a 7.5/10.
Team 3: Sejun Park’s 2013 Top 8 WCS Team
https://pokepast.es/eeb454b524b36444
Next, I decided to try out one of the premiere Hard Trick Room cores of the format. There are quite a few teams that all run Jellicent/Scrafty/Aboma/Lightning Rod, but this one used Marowak over Rhydon so it caught my eye. I personally think that Rhydon is the stronger of the two, but I love Marowak. 90% of the time I could safely lead Scrafty and Jellicent to set up trick room and then mindlessly click big damage buttons until the game was over. The other 10% I led Tornadus and mindlessly clicked buttons until the game was over. If you couldn’t tell already, the team lends itself to being extremely aggressive. Making trades in order to get yourself into either TR or another advantageous board position is necessary, which can make the team feel volatile. In exchange for that volatility in the early game, you can easily put yourself into such heavily favorable positions that the game is basically over.
One of the main struggles of the team was dealing with Amoonguss. While Magmar/Abomasnow/Tornadus acted as answers into it, just the threat of it on a team made going for Trick Room unreliable. Most of the time I would try to lead Tornadus to catch it immediately, but if the opponent was strong they would usually keep it in the back to prevent me from setting up Trick Room without fear. I do also think that replacing Marowak with Rhydon is probably the better choice as stated previously, but I never tested that so it’s more theory than anything. Aside from that, the team really felt solid and losses really were exclusively a matter of my errors and not the team having issues.
I got to no. 5 on ladder with this, and probably could’ve got to no. 1 but games started getting really repetitive. Overall, I think the team is an 8.5/10.
Team 4: Toler Webb’s 2013 12th Place WCS Team
https://pokepast.es/a605663b39d12120
While checking Twitter for something else, I found out that Toler Webb released a paste of his 2013 Worlds team in celebration of the 2013 Ladder going up. Since I was getting tired of Sejun’s team, I decided to switch. This team had a much less linear gameplan. In practice, I often led Bisharp with either Cresselia or Conkeldurr. This helped check a lot of the more common mons that could attempt to stop Trick Room from going up such as Latios, Tornadus, and Landorus. Against more dedicated TR teams than my own, I would often just use Volcarona and Latios to nuke mons and prevent speed control, then use Bisharp and Conkeldurr to clean up with their priority moves. Against Rain compositions, I just used Rotom and Cresselia early game to get damage control and speed control, and from there it’s pretty easy to close out. The team has clear answers into just about every major composition.
However, the team is a little bit weak to just getting blown up. Getting doubled on an important mon can put you way on the back foot. This is compounded by the fact that the Latios, for no reason I have been able to tell, is incredibly slow. Every single Hydreigon and Latios I’ve encountered will outspeed you, and the investment that get put into defenses and special attack instead didn’t feel like they ever made a difference. It technically works with Trick Room, but realistically I would’ve just preferred a Latios that did the things it traditionally does. It made it so much harder to bring because I felt like against most standard teams it was just gonna get nuked before it could do anything, so I couldn’t use it to clean up endgames once Trick Room ended.
This is probably the team I liked the most out of the samples I used, and I ended up getting to no. 3 on ladder with it. I would give it a 9/10, with the slow Latios being my biggest issue.
Team 5: Personal Disquake Team
https://pokepast.es/e935a0dbde84ed3d
After using all these other people’s teams, I decided it was time to make one myself. The concept was born from a discussion I had with my friend Oops; they claimed that there was no reason to use Gastrodon over other bulky waters, and I decided to be a contrarian. My immediate thought with what it could do over other water types was effectively disquake. However, obviously I’m running Gastrodon as a special attacker, so not quite disquake. I chose to follow the more offensively minded Gastrodon sets that saw success in gen 7, so I went with life orb. Then, it just needed an Electric type partner. Zapdos sees relatively little use in the format, but I thought it would be a good discharge user due to it having better bulk than Thundurus. It also has Heat Wave, which I really liked having for easy kills on Scizor. Zapdos + Gastrodon meant that many people didn’t bring their rain mode immediately, so they would instead lead Scizor and get nuked. After those two, I added common mons that I felt comfortable with and that had good meta matchups.
I love playing with this team, though I’m biased since it’s my own creation. Using a team you know the opponent hasn’t seen before is a huge benefit, and it made me so much more relaxed during matches. However, I think Zapdos is almost certainly just worse than Thundurus-Therian for this role. Volt Absorb basically makes up for the bulk drop, and the higher speed and special attack would make a huge difference. There were kills that I barely missed at times, and I know that with Thundurus-Therian I would’ve gotten them. Aside from that, I really don’t have any huge issues with the team. I’m sure it could be optimized a lot more, but I’m really happy with it as is.
Overall, I’d rate this an 8/10. It just doesn’t quite hit the clear strength of a lot of the other teams here, but there aren’t any huge flaws so I was still able to get to no. 4 with it.
Team 6: Ben Kyriakou’s 2013 UK Nationals Winning Team
https://pokepast.es/86b6dd02a101b0d5
My friend Raden is possibly the biggest TopMoth fan there is, so in honor of them I decided to play this team. Unfortunately, I kinda suck at using TopMoth. I understand the basic lines that the team is supposed to have. However, putting that into actual practice successfully is a different matter. Most of the time I just fell back on using the heavy hitters of Tornadus/Tyranitar /Hydreigon with Hitmontop supporting them. That is definitely not the intended way to play every match, but I just couldn’t ever find a way to convince myself to bring Volcarona. Obviously, it has incredible offensive potential, but every match had so many reasons to not bring it. More often than not there were just too many potential checks to it, and none of the techs on the team felt reliable at stopping them. Nothing could reliably kill a Thundurus before it got multiple Thunder Waves off, Rock Slide is everywhere, and Rain matches would just be incredibly complicated.
Now, if you look at the team there are still plenty of intended answers for those. Volcarona runs the Lum Berry for checking Thundurus, Hitmontop has Wide Guard, and Tyranitar lets you play weather wars. With smart play, you can absolutely make Volcarona into the monster that it is supposed to be. I just don’t feel confident in playing that way. “Get Down Mr. President” is just not a method I like, and that influenced how I played the team to an incredible extent.
I was still able to get to no. 7 on ladder with this, but it was not a particularly easy ride. In the end, I would rate this team 6/10 due to the incompatibility in styles.
Team 7: PepeMD’s Personal Team
https://pokepast.es/a1d06dd0bb6562bc
About mid-way through the ladder, someone I had gotten to know through playing them and the Poketopia discord asked me if I could give some suggestions for a team. This was PepeMD, and they had already decided on a strong core of 5 and felt confident in it, but were looking for a final mon. I suggested Volcarona, which led to them creating the team I would use for the rest of the ladder. The majority of the team and sets were done by PepeMD, and he has his own team report that goes into far more detail than I will, but I can explain some of the choices that I suggested. To start, I think Volcarona gave much better answers into steel types and Cresselia compositions than the team had previously. Skill Swap Cresselia + Heatran had a great mu into the team, but adding Volcarona allowed us to either immediately kill the Cresselia or pin the Heatran when it removed the fire immunity. After adding Volcarona, we also added Sunny Day on our own Cresselia. This made us have a really good match up into rain, and allowed the non-set up Volcarona to do amazing damage. I also helped to finalize the sets on Tornadus and Landorus. We decided on Superpower and Tailwind for Tornadus, as this just gave us solid coverage into Steel types and another way to deal with weather teams. For Landorus, we added Stone Edge to check other genies. A lot of the time you could simply click Stone Edge on a Tornadus or Thundurus to immediately remove a huge problem mon, which made matches much smoother.
I used this to team to end the ladder as no. 1, and I can honestly say it was my favorite to use overall. The only issues I ever had with it were that a decent chunk of moves were inconsistent and the MU into certain rain teams like Oops’ Perish Rain were a bit concerning. Even when I missed though, I never felt out of it. There were always options to play myself back into games. And if nothing else worked, Rock Slide can hax its way through. I’d rate this team a 9/10, and hopefully I get to use it even more in the future.
Conclusion
As much as I’d like to say it was skill that got me to no. 1 on ladder, it really was a combination of good teams, a commitment to playing through losses, and a bit of luck. Most of all though, it was a testament to how much I was enjoying the format. There was so much to explore and test, with even more that I never got to. Hopefully this ladder leads to more oldgen vgc ones in the future, and we can keep exploring metas that may never run out of new things to show us.
Hi, I'm Radio! I ended up finishing the ladder at no. 1, so I thought I'd post a short review of some of the teams I used. I started playing VGC in 2023, so my experience with the 2013 format had previously been limited to sporadic tours in the VGC chat room on Showdown. However, I’m friends with a couple people who are quite invested in the format, so I decided I would spend quite a lot of time on ladder trying to get the most of the month. To enjoy it to the fullest, I spent time with quite a few different teams, getting them all to Top 10 on ladder. Most of these teams were sourced from the poketopia discord server, which is focused on gen 4 and 5 VGC formats, so thanks to them for providing these. These will be relatively short write ups of my thoughts on using each, not a full team report.
Team 1: Enigne’s 2013 Seniors WCS Winning Team
https://pokepast.es/66ac91b065006e26
The first team I used was decided on primarily due to containing Machamp. I really wanted to see the edge cases of the format, rather than what I was already familiar with in stuff like Arash, Cybertron, and Gini’s teams. That’s not to say this team doesn’t include many of the format staples; realistically the team hinges on mons like Swords Dance Scizor and Electric Gem Rotom to control games. However, many of the more surprising item choices really make a difference in the CTS format. Leftovers + Substitute Thundurus allows you to disrupt the flow of the game far longer than people usually expect, and Psychic Gem Cresselia makes you much more threatening towards many of the Trick Room threats in the format. These techs allowed me to reach no. 1 on the ladder, but the team did feel significantly flawed.
Cresselia had both Safeguard and Swagger – while the synergy should be somewhat obvious, in practice it just never worked out for me. It was just too vulnerable to RNG. I could get Thunder Waved before Safeguard ever went up, swaggering an opponent isn’t consistent, and trying to self swagger under safeguard just took way too much set up to be reliable. Then, there was Machamp. While it did give me a free win into someone trying to run Shuckle-Chansey, it just was a weak link. It’s too slow, too frail, and wide guard sucks in gen 5 due to having a fail chance. Finally, the team doesn’t have a single electric resist. With the prevalence of various Thundurus and Rotom forms on ladder, this made playing safe a nightmare.
Overall, I’d rate this team a 6/10. It’s a legitimately powerful composition, but there are too many significant flaws.
Team 2: Personal Modification of Enigne’s Team
https://pokepast.es/c75fc5501274043d
After using Enigne’s team, I wanted to attempt my own version. I started by killing two birds with one stone: removing machamp and replacing it with an electric resist. For this, I ended up choosing Hydreigon. While not as immediately oppressive as Latios is in this format, it paired extremely well with Scizor. Running Earth Power meant I had a consistent check to Heatran to support Scizor, and Dark Gem + Bug Bite from Scizor meant I could consistently remove Cresselia with them. As for my own Cresselia, I decided to replace Swagger and Safeguard with Moonlight and Trick Room. This gave me far better speed control options than I previously had, which counterintuitively helped one of my fastest mons, Hydreigon. Since Hydreigon can’t outspeed Latios or Tornadus, two of the most common and powerful mons in the format, setting up Trick Room allowed me to beat those two consistently with a relatively fast mon. Moonlight just gave me extra sustainability, which is nice when running an aggressive item like Psychic Gem. Finally, I replaced Rotom’s HP Grass with HP Ice. I just wasn’t encountering any Gastrodons and it felt really nice to have a reliable way to hit Landorus and Grass types.
Using this team I once again reached no. 1 on ladder. I felt significantly more comfortable with it, but the match ups into Tornadus-Latios were always tense, so I would only give it a 7.5/10.
Team 3: Sejun Park’s 2013 Top 8 WCS Team
https://pokepast.es/eeb454b524b36444
Next, I decided to try out one of the premiere Hard Trick Room cores of the format. There are quite a few teams that all run Jellicent/Scrafty/Aboma/Lightning Rod, but this one used Marowak over Rhydon so it caught my eye. I personally think that Rhydon is the stronger of the two, but I love Marowak. 90% of the time I could safely lead Scrafty and Jellicent to set up trick room and then mindlessly click big damage buttons until the game was over. The other 10% I led Tornadus and mindlessly clicked buttons until the game was over. If you couldn’t tell already, the team lends itself to being extremely aggressive. Making trades in order to get yourself into either TR or another advantageous board position is necessary, which can make the team feel volatile. In exchange for that volatility in the early game, you can easily put yourself into such heavily favorable positions that the game is basically over.
One of the main struggles of the team was dealing with Amoonguss. While Magmar/Abomasnow/Tornadus acted as answers into it, just the threat of it on a team made going for Trick Room unreliable. Most of the time I would try to lead Tornadus to catch it immediately, but if the opponent was strong they would usually keep it in the back to prevent me from setting up Trick Room without fear. I do also think that replacing Marowak with Rhydon is probably the better choice as stated previously, but I never tested that so it’s more theory than anything. Aside from that, the team really felt solid and losses really were exclusively a matter of my errors and not the team having issues.
I got to no. 5 on ladder with this, and probably could’ve got to no. 1 but games started getting really repetitive. Overall, I think the team is an 8.5/10.
Team 4: Toler Webb’s 2013 12th Place WCS Team
https://pokepast.es/a605663b39d12120
While checking Twitter for something else, I found out that Toler Webb released a paste of his 2013 Worlds team in celebration of the 2013 Ladder going up. Since I was getting tired of Sejun’s team, I decided to switch. This team had a much less linear gameplan. In practice, I often led Bisharp with either Cresselia or Conkeldurr. This helped check a lot of the more common mons that could attempt to stop Trick Room from going up such as Latios, Tornadus, and Landorus. Against more dedicated TR teams than my own, I would often just use Volcarona and Latios to nuke mons and prevent speed control, then use Bisharp and Conkeldurr to clean up with their priority moves. Against Rain compositions, I just used Rotom and Cresselia early game to get damage control and speed control, and from there it’s pretty easy to close out. The team has clear answers into just about every major composition.
However, the team is a little bit weak to just getting blown up. Getting doubled on an important mon can put you way on the back foot. This is compounded by the fact that the Latios, for no reason I have been able to tell, is incredibly slow. Every single Hydreigon and Latios I’ve encountered will outspeed you, and the investment that get put into defenses and special attack instead didn’t feel like they ever made a difference. It technically works with Trick Room, but realistically I would’ve just preferred a Latios that did the things it traditionally does. It made it so much harder to bring because I felt like against most standard teams it was just gonna get nuked before it could do anything, so I couldn’t use it to clean up endgames once Trick Room ended.
This is probably the team I liked the most out of the samples I used, and I ended up getting to no. 3 on ladder with it. I would give it a 9/10, with the slow Latios being my biggest issue.
Team 5: Personal Disquake Team
https://pokepast.es/e935a0dbde84ed3d
After using all these other people’s teams, I decided it was time to make one myself. The concept was born from a discussion I had with my friend Oops; they claimed that there was no reason to use Gastrodon over other bulky waters, and I decided to be a contrarian. My immediate thought with what it could do over other water types was effectively disquake. However, obviously I’m running Gastrodon as a special attacker, so not quite disquake. I chose to follow the more offensively minded Gastrodon sets that saw success in gen 7, so I went with life orb. Then, it just needed an Electric type partner. Zapdos sees relatively little use in the format, but I thought it would be a good discharge user due to it having better bulk than Thundurus. It also has Heat Wave, which I really liked having for easy kills on Scizor. Zapdos + Gastrodon meant that many people didn’t bring their rain mode immediately, so they would instead lead Scizor and get nuked. After those two, I added common mons that I felt comfortable with and that had good meta matchups.
I love playing with this team, though I’m biased since it’s my own creation. Using a team you know the opponent hasn’t seen before is a huge benefit, and it made me so much more relaxed during matches. However, I think Zapdos is almost certainly just worse than Thundurus-Therian for this role. Volt Absorb basically makes up for the bulk drop, and the higher speed and special attack would make a huge difference. There were kills that I barely missed at times, and I know that with Thundurus-Therian I would’ve gotten them. Aside from that, I really don’t have any huge issues with the team. I’m sure it could be optimized a lot more, but I’m really happy with it as is.
Overall, I’d rate this an 8/10. It just doesn’t quite hit the clear strength of a lot of the other teams here, but there aren’t any huge flaws so I was still able to get to no. 4 with it.
Team 6: Ben Kyriakou’s 2013 UK Nationals Winning Team
https://pokepast.es/86b6dd02a101b0d5
My friend Raden is possibly the biggest TopMoth fan there is, so in honor of them I decided to play this team. Unfortunately, I kinda suck at using TopMoth. I understand the basic lines that the team is supposed to have. However, putting that into actual practice successfully is a different matter. Most of the time I just fell back on using the heavy hitters of Tornadus/Tyranitar /Hydreigon with Hitmontop supporting them. That is definitely not the intended way to play every match, but I just couldn’t ever find a way to convince myself to bring Volcarona. Obviously, it has incredible offensive potential, but every match had so many reasons to not bring it. More often than not there were just too many potential checks to it, and none of the techs on the team felt reliable at stopping them. Nothing could reliably kill a Thundurus before it got multiple Thunder Waves off, Rock Slide is everywhere, and Rain matches would just be incredibly complicated.
Now, if you look at the team there are still plenty of intended answers for those. Volcarona runs the Lum Berry for checking Thundurus, Hitmontop has Wide Guard, and Tyranitar lets you play weather wars. With smart play, you can absolutely make Volcarona into the monster that it is supposed to be. I just don’t feel confident in playing that way. “Get Down Mr. President” is just not a method I like, and that influenced how I played the team to an incredible extent.
I was still able to get to no. 7 on ladder with this, but it was not a particularly easy ride. In the end, I would rate this team 6/10 due to the incompatibility in styles.
Team 7: PepeMD’s Personal Team
https://pokepast.es/a1d06dd0bb6562bc
About mid-way through the ladder, someone I had gotten to know through playing them and the Poketopia discord asked me if I could give some suggestions for a team. This was PepeMD, and they had already decided on a strong core of 5 and felt confident in it, but were looking for a final mon. I suggested Volcarona, which led to them creating the team I would use for the rest of the ladder. The majority of the team and sets were done by PepeMD, and he has his own team report that goes into far more detail than I will, but I can explain some of the choices that I suggested. To start, I think Volcarona gave much better answers into steel types and Cresselia compositions than the team had previously. Skill Swap Cresselia + Heatran had a great mu into the team, but adding Volcarona allowed us to either immediately kill the Cresselia or pin the Heatran when it removed the fire immunity. After adding Volcarona, we also added Sunny Day on our own Cresselia. This made us have a really good match up into rain, and allowed the non-set up Volcarona to do amazing damage. I also helped to finalize the sets on Tornadus and Landorus. We decided on Superpower and Tailwind for Tornadus, as this just gave us solid coverage into Steel types and another way to deal with weather teams. For Landorus, we added Stone Edge to check other genies. A lot of the time you could simply click Stone Edge on a Tornadus or Thundurus to immediately remove a huge problem mon, which made matches much smoother.
I used this to team to end the ladder as no. 1, and I can honestly say it was my favorite to use overall. The only issues I ever had with it were that a decent chunk of moves were inconsistent and the MU into certain rain teams like Oops’ Perish Rain were a bit concerning. Even when I missed though, I never felt out of it. There were always options to play myself back into games. And if nothing else worked, Rock Slide can hax its way through. I’d rate this team a 9/10, and hopefully I get to use it even more in the future.
Conclusion
As much as I’d like to say it was skill that got me to no. 1 on ladder, it really was a combination of good teams, a commitment to playing through losses, and a bit of luck. Most of all though, it was a testament to how much I was enjoying the format. There was so much to explore and test, with even more that I never got to. Hopefully this ladder leads to more oldgen vgc ones in the future, and we can keep exploring metas that may never run out of new things to show us.
Last edited: