An Introduction to Team Building

People often say that a Pokémon player’s success is determined by three things: team building, battling ability, and luck. While luck is largely outside of a player’s control, and battling ability can be acquired over time, team building is something that continues to vex less experienced players. This guide will attempt to put you on the right path towards building an effective team.

Part I: Elements of an Effective Team

A good team has a goal.

The goal of any Pokémon player is to win, and a team should help in this endeavor by giving the player the tools he needs to achieve victory. Every team that you make should have some sort of idea, a strategy that will help you both defeat the opponent’s Pokémon and keep your own healthy. The strategy can be as complex as “set up Hail and Trick Room to pull off a Glaceon sweep” or a simple as “kill the opposing Pokémon with powerful attacks,” but whatever goal you select, you should keep it at the front of your mind throughout the team building process. Every member of your team should actively aid you in this goal.

A word of caution, however — making a team too dependent on any single strategy can be potentially disastrous. For example, if every member of your team has less than 50 base speed and you are unable to set Trick Room, then you’re in a very bad spot indeed. The best teams not only function superbly in their favored condition, in this case Trick Room, but can also hold their own if they fail to set up their strategy or if it gets reversed. Remember, your opponent is trying to stop you from achieving your goal while executing his own, and it is possible that you won’t be able to win the game in the way you set out to. That’s why you must be flexible with your goal. At the start of every game, you should ask yourself the best way to win the battle with the tools you possess. Stubbornly clinging to the Glaceon sweep idea, for example, might not be a good plan if your opponent has 3 Steel-types.

The Japanese style of play exemplifies this concept, as almost every Japanese team uses some form of weather, Swagger + Persim/Lum, Gravity, Trick Room, or any combination of the above to give themselves the advantage in any battle. A more local example would be Tony Cheung’s (Chinese_Dood) winning Canadian Nationals team, which is built around a more interesting goal — shutting down Rain teams. He achieves this through the use of Latias, who, while often overlooked, is bulkier than her brother and an excellent support mon; Hidden Power Grass Rotom-W, who can KO Gastrodon; and 2 other water resists in Gyarados and Hydreigon, while still covering other important team archetypes. His chosen goal / strategy proved rather useful in giving him the distinct team advantage during his Round of 8 match against Randy Kwa (R Inanimate), and to a lesser extent in the finals against Mike Papagianis (skarm).

A good team disrupts the opponent’s goal.

This concept is equally as — if not more — important than the above. Perhaps you have the ultimate Rain team, with 5 Swift Swimmers and a whole lot of Water-type attacks to pound your opponent with. Even so, if you don’t have something to stop Trick Room, Hail, or perhaps even both, you’re going to lose a LOT of battles. Remember, your opponent also has a strategy he wants to perform, and if you don’t try to stop it, you’ll almost certainly lose. For example, consider for a moment that Tyranitar is one of the most popular Pokémon in a metagame infested by Hitmontop, Scizor, Metagross and Garchomp. It’s not because everybody is running a Sand team (although that IS a popular route). It’s because Tyranitar is a fantastic disrupter Pokémon. Weather reliant teams, like Hail or Rain, can have trouble with Tyranitar’s ability to change the weather to Sandstorm, while Trick Room teams usually rely on Ghost- or Psychic-type Pokémon to set up Trick Room, which get mauled by a Tyranitar Crunch. By simply including Tyranitar on your team, you give yourself a very useful tool with which to disrupt your opponent’s chosen strategy.

Of course, you aren’t invincible against Rain or Trick Room just because you throw a Tyranitar into the back of your party; your opponent knows that you don’t want to deal with his chosen strategy and has probably taken measures to ensure that he is successful regardless. Hitmontop is so popular on Trick Room teams because, courtesy of Fake Out and Intimidate, he can give his partner the opportunity to set up Trick Room even in the face of such threats as Tyranitar. The same goes for Toxicroak on Rain, who has the added bonus of healing HP thanks to Dry Skin. Well-made teams have strategies that are difficult to disrupt, so be sure that you give yourself the tools you need to win against any team.

The American style of play is very strong on stopping the opponent from executing his goal. Americans frequently employ a strategy called “Goodstuffs”, which relies upon simply using strong Pokémon with tight synergy and various anti-weather and anti-Trick Room Pokémon to dominate the pace of the game. An excellent example of this strategy can be seen in Luke Swenson’s (theamericandream38) Nationals team, which was dedicated to keeping the opponent off their footing. Sableye’s Trick + Lagging Tail strategy allows it to function as an excellent counter to the Swagger + Lum/Persim setup that was frequently seen at the tournament, and also allowed him to Taunt things with Gyarados that might have a Mental Herb, among other uses. Choice Scarf Tyranitar, although a somewhat unusal choice, was highly effective in its capacity to Crunch or Rock Slide unsuspecting Latios or Zapdos who expected to have the Speed advantage.

A good team is unexpected and unprepared for.

This can be a very tricky concept for a newer player to employ correctly. Basically, remember that your opponent is trying to disrupt your strategy, but if he’s never heard of your strategy, or you’re using it in a different way than he’s used to, or he flat out isn’t expecting you to use it, then you already have the advantage. A fantastic example is the rise of HP Fire Latios at US Nationals. People had been using Scizor to counter Latios all season, despite the fact that Latios can OHKO any non-Occa Scizor with Hidden Power Fire. Until this point, however, HP Fire was extremely uncommon since it dropped the speed IV to 30 and could make your Latios slower than your opponent’s if it didn’t have HP Fire, so many Scizor users (including yours truly) lost important matches at Nats because their Scizors died to the things they were supposed to counter. Of course I had heard of HP Fire Latios, but I simply didn’t expect it to be prevalent, and many smart players capitalized on this mindset to perform better at Nats.

It’s a simple concept, but what kills newer players is taking this concept to the extreme. Unusual movesets, EV spreads and item choices are all fantastic, but don’t use something just for the sake of being unusual. Make sure that your selection is still actually good. Certainly nobody would expect Special Tauros, for example, but with such poor Special Attack, he would hardly be threatening. A good rule of thumb is that your team should work fine even if your opponent knew everything about it, down to the final EV spread. Once the surprise value of a novelty set wears off, you still have to use it the rest of the battle, so make sure that it can carry its weight. Remember that there’s nothing wrong with using standard Pokémon and standard spreads — in fact, they’re oftentimes the best choice for the job — but using both creative and GOOD Pokémon teams gives you the upper hand and can be more rewarding and fun.

It would be a contradiction in terms to say that any single metagame revolves around being unexpected and unique, but there are many players that have taken advantage of this principle. Alison McDonald’s (Fishy) Nationals team was indeed rather peculiar at first glance but perfectly demonstrated the way that underused Pokémon can be very anti-metagame. Marowak was tailor-made for the US Nationals metagame, absorbing the rampant Thunder Waves and Electric-type attacks for his partner and holding the distinction of being able to OHKO even the most physically defensive Metagross with a Ground-type attack, while Crobat was the perfect Hitmontop counter, with Inner Focus preventing flinch, a 4x Fighting resist, and the ability to OHKO or damage heavily any Hitmontop with Acrobatics.

Part II: Building an Effective Team

Once you understand these concepts, you might be itching to start building your own super awesome team but have no idea how to go about it. Teambuilding is somewhat tricky because everybody does it differently, and there’s no set-in-stone guide on how to do it. I can, however, talk about some similarities between most styles of successful teambuilding.

Getting Started

For some players, getting started is the hardest part; for some, the easiest. For some the most important part of the team is the first member; for some, it’s utterly trivial. I find that a good way to get started is to settle upon my goal. To use a previous example, saying I want to sweep with Glaceon already solidifies Abomasnow / Glaceon and sets me on the right track to flesh the rest of the team out. I could also speak more broadly and say I want to use an offensive Rain team, which means I’ll likely be using Politoed. When you’re choosing something to start with, its usually wise to start with the most “unusual” choice you plan on accommodating, since niche mons, while effective, often require the most support. If you can’t find anything to start with, analyze the metagame and recognize what would be effective at beating common sets. Sometimes, however, you might not feel the inspiration you need to get your team started, and when you’re feeling like this it’s sometimes a good idea to just say, “Regice is cool, let’s use that!” or something to that effect. Keep in mind that when all’s said and done, the Pokémon you built a team around might not be the star member (and most of the time, it won’t be), so try to keep an open mind and just start building one way or another.

Pick Partners, Create Cores

This is the part where people start going their different ways — there are a lot of different ways to start building the rest of your team. One popular way is to focus on pairs. This idea is pretty simple: in a Doubles metagame, you’re usually going to have 2 Pokémon out at the same time, so creating as many powerful pairs as possible is a natural progression. For example, my Houston Regionals team started off with my desire to use Jynx. From there picking Suicune was pretty easy since it gave me a Fire resist, a Sandstorm check, a way of boosting Speed, and even emergency recovery via Hydro Pump + Dry Skin, while Jynx could use Fake Out to give Suicune an easier time at setting up Tailwind. The entire team ended up being 3 pairs I found very effective: Zapdos + Garchomp, the aforementioned Jynx + Suicune, and Bisharp + Specs Salamence.

When you build around pairs, however, remember that it’s not always possible to have your preferred pair out, so all 6 members of your team have to function with any other member. A second, more common option is to start building a “core”. A core is a group of 3-4 Pokémon that cover most threats by virtue of their typing, stats, and movepool. The advantage of using a core is that you don’t have to pull out your hair trying to find a counter to everything, since with 3-4 mons you cover most things and you can focus the remaining teamslots on beating what threats break your core. One common example is the Fire-Water-Grass core; this concept, borrowed from the in-game player’s notebook, is surprisingly effective in competitive play, giving a player solid resistances to many important types. Very little really messes with the plans of a “FWG” core, but a glaring exception would be Dragons. Because of this, the remaining slots of a FWG core team usually feature Pokémon like Metagross and Cresselia to complete the threatlist.

Wrapping Up

The last slot or two is usually the trickiest. Once you have the “main idea” of the team fleshed out, you want to take a step back and make sure that you’re adequately covered against everything. These Pokémon are frequently called “glue” Pokémon, since they are added at the end of the process and “hold a team together” by protecting it against various threats the builder may have forgotten in the initial stages of team building. To continue that FWG example from before, I might have then added a Metagross to give me a Dragon resist, but then realized that I have nothing to stop Trick Room or Sandstorm. I might then want to add something like Dusclops, who can reverse Trick Room and burn largely physical Sandstorm teams with Will-o-Wisp. This is also a good time to turn a critical eye towards the synergy of the team. If you were making a “Hail Room” team, for example, the team could look something like Abomasnow / Glaceon / Jellicent / Hitmontop. This looks good, but there are several holes in the team. At a glance, HP Flying Thundurus can hit the entire team Super Effectively, and Bisharp is basically unchecked courtesy of Defiant. Things like this aren’t immediately obvious just from looking at a type chart!

Testing and Fine Tuning

Once you’ve got the first draft of your team, it’s time to start testing it! Hopefully if your team has any big problems, you caught them while team building, but sometimes they can sneak through. In fact, most little problems will probably go unnoticed. When testing, make sure you aren’t testing against the same people or the same teams over and over again. Expose yourself to a variety of teams and playstyles, and if none of your friends has the right kind of team, make if yourself. You want to cover all weathers and archetypes, as well as most common Pokémon. The only way you can really go wrong here is to over-tailor your team towards beating stuff you won’t see a lot. This is why you shouldn’t only battle against that one friend you have: if your buddy uses the same teams a lot, your teams will probably focus too much on beating him and not enough on beating everyone else.

Once you see that you have weaknesses, patch them up! If you liked the way that your team works, but notice a small weakness, then try to change as little as possible — oftentimes a simple EV spread adjustment or moveset switch is all you need. Even if you’re not weak to a specific mon, per se, be sure to optimize all of your spreads / sets. Sometimes you might be running a set that is just plain old bad, could be better, or might not be right for the team. If you’re unsure about what move to use for that 4th slot, try them both and figure out which better helps the flow of the team — same goes for any item, nature, or other aspect of a Pokémon you’re iffy about. Leave no path unsearched, so that when you’ve settled on the final product, you’re happy with everything about it.

Practice, Practice, PRACTICE!

Once you think you have a version of the team that you like, then all the testing you’ve been doing turns into practicing. There’s a reason that you can hand somebody a team and, even if its a very good team, they won’t do well with it initially — it takes some time to get used to a team. It’s kinda like the first time you have to drive your friend’s car and you have to get used to the brakes, turning radius, find where the high-beams are on the dash and where the parking brake is. Your team works well, but you’ve probably noticed some things about it that make it perform better, like how X and Y are a surprisingly effective combination, or how you’re weak to Z but you can do A, B and C to stop it. These things might not be obvious at a first glance. Whatever you do, make sure you’re comfortable with the team and that it fits your style, so that when you go to an actual event, you have no regrets!