Seeing as Pokémon home is ending and everyone is scrambling to get cool new ideas played with pokemon while they have a chance I figure I finally want to try one I’ve been planning for a while now; a more casual challenge run I call “Everyone has a favorite” the idea of this challenge is to use the conventionally worst but still viable team. The goal is to showcase that everything is viable and you can love conventionally low tier pokemon. Here’s the restrictions

-Pokemon team should be able to comfortable run all HMs

-Pokemon team should run close to no duplicate types

-Pokemon team should average around 300 BST or end up with a team BST of 1700-2600

- Try to avoid prevolutions and especially avoid viable ones. (To showcase Pokemon who aren’t “great” by most standards)

- No using Pokemon that are commonly picked up for teams in a game (Like star raptor for dpp, as it’s easy to get thus on a lot of teams)

- Encouraged to use niche Pokemon

- Do postgame content too

-rules are not final stick more towards the spirit

So now my goal is to find the best possible team that fit these pretenses without trading and find what game I could put this team together in and play through that game with a team like this. Preferably gens 1-7 so I can play them on my DS or N2DSXL and transfer them up.

Please respond and discuss the best possible teams fitting the criteria for this potential run. Thank you

Hey Nuzlockers! Been building a tool called jonix-soullinktracker and wanted to share where it's at.

The short version: pick Soullink (2-player) or Nuzlocke (solo) mode, get a room code, enter your encounters as you play. If you're doing Soullink, your partner joins the same code and you both see the same board update live — no spreadsheet, no screen-sharing to stay in sync.

How It Works

1. Hit "New Nuzlocke" or "New Soullink" — get a room code automatically
2. (Soullink only) Share the code with your partner, they join the same room
3. Log encounters as you go — catch, box, or mark dead, it's tracked live

What It Tracks

Encounter Log — every route, what you caught, what you missed, evolution status per link.

Graveyard — fallen Pokémon, still counted toward your locked Pokédex progress.

Pokédex — full National Dex 1–905, evolution lines auto-lock the moment you encounter a species without catching it.

Team Builder — drag-and-drop 6-slot team, auto-calculated Power Score, a 0–100 team rating, and a full type-weakness breakdown. One-click "auto-pick best team" if you want a suggestion.

Type Chart — generation-accurate. Bug vs. Poison, Steel's old Ghost/Dark resistances, the Gen 1 Ghost-vs-Psychic bug — all modeled per the actual game you're playing, not one static chart glued onto every generation.

Level Cap Tracker — every gym leader / rival / Elite Four fight pre-loaded per game, with your current progress always visible.

Catch Calculator — quick odds check before you throw a ball.

Supported Games
18 titles, Gen 1 through Gen 8, including remakes (HGSS, ORAS, BDSP) — ROM hacks/randomizers work fine too since everything's manual entry, not save-file parsing.

The Details

• Free, no account needed beyond a room code
• Runs entirely in-browser, mobile-friendly
• Mega Evolutions and regional forms (Alola/Galar) included in the team builder
• OBS/Twitch overlay in progress for streamers

This is actively being developed, and updates will keep coming — bug report button is built right into the app if you spot something.

Good luck with ur next Nuzlocke run!

Jonix

Here's a challenge-run-related tool that I'd like to share.

Dexelect is a random Pokémon team generator. It's bit different from other team generators:

1. It takes into consideration the logical progression of a given game and assigns each team a "feasibility" grade.

2. It's focused on challenge runs. Use it to randomly generate an obtainable party, then challenge yourself to enter the Hall of Fame with that party.

Currently, Gens 1 – 4 are supported, with plans to expand to later generations soon.

If you want to try it, check out the web app. For the desktop app, visit the GitHub page.

My mates and I have only completed this challenge in a few games:

Red, Blue, Yellow, Gold, Silver, Fire red, Leaf green, and Heart gold. And I will be attempting a Crystal run soon as my thirst for adventure has been renewed.

We don’t play any of the newer games because we’re old, shout at clouds, and don’t like new things. But we are curious if this challenge is possible in other games so please try and let us know!

The impossible new cap challenge:

1. The crux - You must capture any new encounter. If you haven't caught this Pokemon before you must capture it. Once captured that Pokemon is now free to be battled in future wild encounters.
2. The standard - Solo rules apply, only your newest capture may be used in battle. If your solo fighter faints you must reset or blackout.
3. The first wildcard - No repels, this encourages more frequent encounters ensuring better randomising of potential Pokemon.
4. The worst wildcard - No HM slaves. This is the rule that ends most runs due to soft locking you in or out of areas. This is what brings the real fun to the challenge adding a puzzle element to the overworld.

Optional rules.
No items in battle, no evolving, no repeats of evolutions line (e.g. you catch a caterpie you now can’t catch metapod or butter free), no in game trades or gift pokemon - we’ve only completed fire red with all these rules in place and it was an incredibly difficult team effort.

Honestly this challenge is really fun, like Jrose said in his Prof Oak challenge, considering the routing you use is actually quite fun. Because the further you progress naturally you capture more and more pokemon which whittles away your options in the future. This means you have to think round corners for upcoming battles, HM requirements, and which encounters are worth keeping for the future, but most importantly how to over come victory road and the elite four. To make it through Victory road you need strength and surf. After that your kind of stuck with the pokemon you have, the victory road new encounters (if any), and whatever TM's you have. Unless you white out and fly back, limiting your options to one of the legendary birds, which may also be a problem to reach... But this may not be a problem in other games, like I said earlier we're old and only play the classics.

Here's some stupid ways we have lost the challenge.

Running out of cash and not being able to enter the Safari Zone and being unable to go to new areas due to being unable to acquire pokemon that could learn the needed HM's.

Stranded on Cinnabar with a Growlithe and not picking up any decent rods to get a surf user.

Stuck on Seafoam after catching Golbat and having no pokeballs to collect a new HM user, eventually fainted and returned to Cinnabar and was stuck there due to no rods.

Multiple times softlocked in those stupid islands Bill drags you too after beating Blaine - yes we soon realised you can skip these islands by just saying no to Bill - Thanks for the tip Jrose!

Here’s a link to the first time I ever tried this while on paternity leave if anyone feels like reading a new fathers insomniac ramblings. It was nightmarishly difficult due to it being a first attempt, single speed on one of those knock off game boys with a thousand games on it, and being sleep deprived because of my newborn son.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemonchallenges/s/mnn45xxR0K

TL;DR Fuck Bill and his bullshit islands, fuck the elite four, and in order of capture here's the 46 pokemon I ended up using:

Charmander > Rattata > Pidgey > Kakkuna > Caterpie > Pikachu > Spearow > Mankey > Clefairy > Zubat > Geodude > Paras > Machop > Machoke (evolved) > Cubone > Ghastly > Haunter (evolved) > Oddish > Snorlax > Exeggcute > Nidoran male > Venonat > Dugtrio > Horsea > Tenetacool > Koffing > Growlithe > Grimer > Ditto > Krabby > Shelldar > Psyduck > Tangela > Meowth > Persian (evolved) > Hypno > Gyarados > Doduo > Scyther > Goldeen > Seel > Dewgong (evolved) > Onix > Arbok > Poliwhirl > Poliwrath (evolved).

Anyway, please let us know if and how this would play out in newer games and share your experience with us. We're 4 mid 30's dads who have little gaming joy left outside of our pokemon challenge, and seeing who can fuck up the least in survival games.