Hey guys, excited to share this team I've been working on for a little while.

Team Idea: Hard Trick Room

https://pokepast.es/d247fba69b657743

Everyone's familiar with trick room and how effective Farigiraf can be as a trick room setter. The usual way this is done is Farigiraf alongside a Fake Out user. This team instead typically leads with Farigiraf and Gallade, which supports the following:

Opening Moves

• Farigiraf Trick Room & Gallade Attack
  • Anyone who's used Gallade knows that it hits like a truck thanks to great Atk stats + Sharpness providing a 1.5x boost.
  • Expert Belt on top effectively means OHKO for everything that's hit super effectively, but it OHKO's a lot that isn't specifically bulky too.
• Farigiraf Trick Room & Gallade Wide Guard
  • Obvious counter to spread damage
• Farigiraf Protect & Gallade Trick Room
  • My favourite and the real flexibility of this strategy.
  • A lot of teams will double into Farigiraf turn 1 because it can be so problematic. Or their trick room strategy is getting a Taunt user to disable Farigiraf.
  • Protecting + Gallade Trick Room still sets up the same, while keeping Farigiraf at 100%
• Farigiraf Imprison & Gallade Trick Room
  • Imprison Farigiraf is incredibly OP as I'll describe below, and if I can get that in on Turn 1 because I'm not afraid of a Farigiraf KO (or my opponent has Farigiraf that I want to disable immediately), this line is effective.

Once Trick Room is up, it's run just like any other Trick Room team: the sweepers Torkoal, Kingambit and Mega-Ampharos do huge damage.

Secondary Idea: Imprison Farigiraf

My favourite wincon with this team is setting Imprison with Farigiraf. This obviously means that opponents are locked out of using to Protect to stall Trick Room, which is the absolute perfect scenario to bring in the TR sweepers.

A 100% healthy Torkoal doing spread damage with Eruption, moving first because it's so slow and Farigiraf is blocking both priority moves with Armor Tail and Protect with Imprison, is a nightmare to deal with.

Because Farigiraf is so slow it obviously gives me the option to double into a pokemon that is Imprisoned with Psychic, or to use Protect myself to keep the Farigiraf alive and the Imprison going. This means that Farigiraf is providing huge value after the initial trick room setting, just by staying alive.

Protect is considered the best move in pokemon, so locking your opponent out of it feels pretty OP to me.

Team Description

• Gallade and Farigiraf: Trick Room Setters (Offensive w/ Gallade, Utility w/ Farigiraf)
• Torkoal, Kingambit, Ampharos: Trick Room Sweepers
• Aegislash: Not sure yet.

Weaknesses:

• It's hard trick room, so if my opponent manages to out-guess / out manoeuvre my opening couple of turns and take out both trick room setters, the game is lost
• There's potentially a structural weakness with two Psychic types, but STAB Sharpness boosted, Expert Belt boosted Sacred Sword will OHKO any Dark type. Ghost types could be a problem but the Steel Ghosts are vulnerable to fighting and Basculegion is OHKO by leaf blade. Bug is a problem, but as Bug is a tough type to make work, it's not too common, and I have Torkoal in the back most games anyway
• 6th pokemon. It's Aegislash at the moment but I basically never bring it. I've been playing around but haven't found something I'm in love with. Would be great to hear suggestions.

Let me know what you think! Had some success with it, but would be great to hear ideas for how it could be even more competitive

Hey guys, excited to share this team I've been working on for a little while.

Team Idea (bad idea + bad idea = good idea?)

Coming from a background of a lot of Singles OU on Pokemon Showdown, Swampert's long been my favourite pokemon, so when he was added in M-B, I was super excited to try and make a Swampert team work.

My initial rain teams looked like everyone else's who was running a Swampert Pelipper Archaludon core, but I never really loved how it played. It was common enough that every good team had an answer.

I then parked the idea to try and make a trick room team work, using Hatterene, Primavera and Floette. It was fun for a while but still couldn't make it competitive. One thing I found, while tweaking is that while I didn't like Hatterene as a trick room setter I really liked Gallade. Hit super hard when you take into account the boosts from STAB Sharpness moves, learns Wide Guard.

So I started afresh with a Gallade, Mega-Floette trick room core with Kingambit and Sneasler and then while testing and tweaking ran into 2 happy accidents that imo have a lot of synergy: Drampa and Swampert-Mega

Drampa I was looking for answers to some of the rain and sun teams giving me some trouble. Thunderbolt is obviously great into Pelipper, Grass Knot into heavy waters, but the real MVP is the Cloud Nine ability.

Swampert-Mega became useful because Drampa was so good. Cloud Nine meant that the most common Swampert answer (Solar Beam) was now less of a concern.

I really like how this plays, but also wonder if there's any changes that could be made to make it even more competitive vs the meta.

Team Description

Drampa: Probably the MVP. Cloud Nine disables all weather effects, so no move power increases, no accuracy changes, no abilities like Swift Swim activated. It's SO useful vs Torkoal / Pyroar teams, vs Rain, vs Tyranitar. Especially since as a dragon type, Drampa naturally resists Fire, Water etc.

The moveset is aimed at helping coverage: Thunderbolt for water / flying types, Grass Knot mainly for Swamperts and Basculegion, Earth Power helps vs fire types. Any time I see weather in the preview I'm thinking lead with Drampa.

The slow speed makes it great in trick room also.

Swampert: The final addition to the team. Because Drampa makes the Solar Beam a 2 turn move, Swamperts only weakness is much less of a problem. I rely on it whenever I need some bulk, or whenever it has type advantage with one of its attacks.

I think the 4 attack moveset is slightly unusual here, but given the number of fighting attacks in the Meta, Kingambit is limited in certain matchups and I needed some powerful steel attacks for all the fairies. Gholdengo I tested in this slot, but I love Swamperts matchups into Fire, especially once weather is disabled.

Slow so works well with trick room too

Gallade: The starting point for this team, trick room setter that seems to do a decent job actually getting it up. Great into the Steel, Poison and Fighting types that are everywhere in the meta. Wide guard is very useful too, Earthquake, Eruption and Hyper Voice are all super common. In Bo3 it's more predictable, but in a Bo1 there's also the surprise factor, it doesn't feel like many opponents see the wide guard (or the trick room) coming.

The rest of my team is fairly standard metagame

Sneasler: great early game fake out pressure, helps get Trick Room up. Hits hard and outspeeds the majority of the metagame. The second fighting type really helps pressure the Steel Types that would otherwise trouble Floette

Floette-Mega: Alternates with Swampert depending on matchups, though occassionally I'll bring both and decide which to mega in battle. Not doing anything particularly special or unique here, just a big delete button with Fairy Aura lights of ruin. Used as a late game sweeper mostly.

Kingambit: Standard set. I (usually) have enough Psychic and Fairy pressure to clear the fighting types that would give it trouble, but occasionally get caught out by a Fighting coverage move on a non-Fighting pokemon.

Thoughts? I really like it, but I'm not the most experienced team builder, I imagine there's things I could do to make it even stronger.

Link: https://pokepast.es/a5d88384654aeb40