During the final weeks of December, I was looking for a team for the first European Regional on the Nintendo Switch with my bro Cykomore. We tried to build around all the ideas we had or that we found interesting when battling on the Showdown ladder, which is how we found this team.

We later discovered it was probably built by Alex Underhill, as he finished 20th in a Galar Weekly with it. I saw only a few of the team in action, but I immediately thought it was very interesting and felt that the call could be incredible for Bochum, as people seemed to largely sleep on the potential of rain teams since the beginning of VGC20, and would not prepared to battle against it at all. Cykomore tried to reproduce the team as he could, and next we tried to improve it as much as possible.

The original team had a full SpDef. Corviknight with an Iron Defense/Body Press set. It seemed to be an interesting choice, providing a key resistance against some types that were not easy to deal with for the team, like Flying, Fairy and Poison. In the end, though, I found it too passive for such an aggressive team, and I wanted to have an answer against annoying threats to the team such as Gyarados, Duraludon or Charizard that was still good against Tyranitar and Excadrill.

I ended up with Conkeldurr on that slot, which was not the perfect Pokémon, as it didn’t help much in the Charizard/Whimsicott match-up, but with Thunder Punch it posed a big threat under Trick Room against the aforementioned issues to the team, or in general. Moreover, it seemed to fit better with the all-in nature of the team, and it was a Pokémon I loved using in my first teams in the format as well.