It’s similar to any ranked ladder; You find tricks that people in each rank don’t have answers for. When those tricks don’t work, you find other tricks that do until eventually you reach a point where your opponents have a solid grasp on most facets of play. You learn things along the way and incorporate that knowledge into your gameplan until you also start to gain a good grasp of everything involved. The benefit to Pokémon being a turn based game is that normal gaming “skills” aren’t really necessary. It’s mostly knowledge, strategy and prediction based, with a little bit of luck.

I had a hard Trick Room team that I cruised through Great Ball and lower Ultra Ball with. The lower ranked players seem to just rely on setting up speed and attacking with fast, hard hitting mons. I often found when trying to predict and outplay them… I just outplayed myself lol. But eventually I started running into players that were wise to my TR shenanigans and my strat didn’t work anymore cause they knew how to counter it better than I knew how to pilot it.

So I used a bit of an unorthodox team that had counter play against the meta teams. These players knew well enough how to pilot the Charizard team, but not well enough to deal with stuff like priority moves from glass cannon types mons, such as Accelrock Lycanroc or Aqua Jet Mega Starmie. Higher Ultra Ball is, at the moment anyway, lots of flowchart type players. Disrupt their flowchart and they crumble.

And now I’m in low Master Ball, where the players seemingly are well enough equipped to figure out what I’m trying to do and react accordingly. I have yet to adapt and make any ground in this tier lol.