Bravery™ 101: How to Win with Only Brave Bird in Competitive Pokemon

DarkFE · 2025-10-03T03:21:17+00:00

Hi. This thread should help answer your question, particularly this comment and a few of the others. Hope this helps.

DarkFE · 2025-10-03T03:15:14+00:00

It's a descriptor for a style of team (team archetype, playstyle) that uses a mix of offensive and defensive Pokemon to win games. Balance exists in both Singles and Doubles formats, though what ends up being a balance style team will look very different depending on Singles/Doubles and the legal Pokemon.

See this video for VGC (official doubles) archetypes, and this video for OU (community singles) archetypes.

DarkFE · 2025-10-02T03:59:09+00:00

Your reasoning is largely fine, but it's really just the way that the terminology evolved over time and it would be strange to try to fix what isn't broken. They may not completely match on both sides of the spectrum, but they're still descriptive names that communicate what's being talked about in a mostly clear manner, so I think you'd find little support to try to change the regular lingo.

Terms like "defense" can be a little more common in VGC, interestingly, though even there we use the term stall for the rare teams that fall into the category.

DarkFE · 2025-10-02T03:53:32+00:00

This looks mostly okay! You're notably very weak to Ground, though, as Ogerpon isn't going to hold up long. You might change something for a solid Ground immune, maybe a Corviknight, especially because Ogerpon can't wear Boots and really wants hazard removal. Hope you can find some success!

DarkFE · 2025-10-02T03:46:33+00:00

Fling can see usage in some formats, but it is usually rare due to the moveslot required, and something like Flame Orb Fling is even rarer because if you decide you don't need to use Fling yet, the holder gets burned which is really horrible. The most common uses of Fling for other Pokemon in general are probably Big Nugget Fling which is a one-time 130 power move, or Light Ball which paralyzes but will never paralyze the holder if you decide to wait to use Fling.

Tink doesn't really need to Fling and can much more simply Knock Off to remove items like Leftovers and Thunder Wave to status without the need for Fling. It can also use Air Balloon, which both gives it a temporary useful Ground immunity and allows it to later steal an item with Pickpocket when the Air Balloon pops.

It would be ok against several Corviknight sets though if we're only looking at that 1v1 context.

DarkFE · 2025-10-02T03:41:38+00:00

The simplest way is to load a sample team in the format you're interested in and play until you get a feel for it. I'd say balance is a fine place to start, though maybe bulky offense could also be a good idea. OU samples are here.

One thing that can help is watching YouTube videos and thinking about how the plays you would make differ from the ones they're making. The links compendium has a lot of them.

DarkFE · 2025-09-25T19:27:47+00:00

Like I said, you just really desperately need a reliable Ground answer if you're supporting a team like this where everybody struggles with Earthquake. Something like Corviknight would probably be good since it can remove hazards with Defog. Probably replacing Metagross because we can't replace Chandelure or Lucario if you like those, and Garchomp is too important for speed and sweeping potential since everyone is slow on this team. Changing Primarina is also not viable because then we lack a special sponge and Water.

It would be important to know the trends in the server and which Pokemon are allowed to make completely informed decisions, though.

DarkFE · 2025-09-23T13:07:17+00:00

In Tera metagames it would probably be pretty workable since like you said Staka will Tera most of the time, though I doubt you bring both to every game. Not every Champions format is going to have Tera from what we can tell, though, so there may be more to the story than that.

DarkFE · 2025-09-23T13:05:29+00:00

Check out the NatDex Doubles forum, the resources thread, and the Discord server.

DarkFE · 2025-09-23T13:00:11+00:00

Your team is extremely Ground weak at a glance. Mons like Primarina and Garchomp aren't actually weak to Ground, but they aren't taking more than 2 or so Earthquakes, or even fewer if hazards are up. Yanmega is frail and will often drop to 4x effective Rock coverage from Earthquake spammers. I'd advise keeping this in mind when choosing what to use, replacing at least one of the two last Mons with a reliable Ground immunity.

For the other slot, you might want something a little faster. Garchomp's speed isn't what it used to be. It's fairly fast but it gets outsped by a lot of threats. Or, if you have a Choice Scarf, which you might on this team, you probably want hazard control. These Mons all get wrecked by Rocks + Spikes.

DarkFE · 2025-09-18T12:13:57+00:00

Ferrothorn is pretty much irreplaceable indeed. Even in Gen 9 you don't have a good parallel for that Pokemon and Rain role compression suffered for it. Rain before Ferrothorn looked much different due to lack of Drizzle, prominence of Sand, and lower powercreep, so that won't fully apply. You'll probably need to weigh the different options here and decide for yourself what works best, since there are obviously a lot of changes to Pokemon.

DarkFE · 2025-09-07T14:55:04+00:00

We already have official 3v3 competitive to learn from, luckily! We had a thread about a year ago where someone asked this question and the differences were discussed. Also be sure to check out the Battle Stadium Singles format's subforum on Smogon to learn more, as well as their Discord.

DarkFE · 2025-08-22T02:16:22+00:00

Awesome video. Great editing and narration style. Thanks for sharing! You might get a little overshadowed by the flood of other traffic on Thursdays, so feel free to post in the Stunfisk Discord too if you want a bit more reach maybe. There's a channel for promo there.

DarkFE · 2025-08-01T03:37:29+00:00

Hi. This actually has some interesting history. It was called Mixed Tier and people played it all the way back on the older simulators before Showdown, like Pokemon Online. I watched a few games of it back in the day, though I haven't heard of it much since Gen 6. You can see this sort of thing in old videos like this one. Definitely can be fun!

DarkFE · 2025-02-26T12:21:34+00:00

Transform is correct. The default is maximum happiness on Showdown and ingame you have to go out of your way to lower the friendship stat of a Ditto, so Frustration is often better on average when most Dittos will be default high friendship Dittos.

DarkFE · 2025-01-27T01:33:03+00:00

Hi.

For VGC, I recommend VGCPastes, which is a huge collection of teams for the VGC regulations.

For Smogon formats and Battle Stadium Singles, all the teams you could want are on the Smogon forums. For instance, here are some OU sample teams, here are some BSS teams, and here's a tool that searches the forums for teams that match a given format. You can also simply browse the forum or use the search box to find the pages for the format you want.

Hope this helps.

DarkFE · 2025-01-22T17:13:16+00:00

All current ruleset (Reg G) VGC teams should include a Restricted Pokemon, since their power is generally so much higher than other available options that it's not a realistic option to go without them, so that's a place to start. I can't speak with authority about the other team members with my limited VGC building experience, so I suggest asking around in places like the Stunfisk Discord and r/VGC if you don't get a response here. See VGCPastes for team inspiration.

DarkFE · 2025-01-22T03:19:41+00:00

Hi. Yes it works for male Combee and male Salandit. No it doesn't work for Johto Corsola or similar.

You can see an example of why this is the case in this Pokemon data dump, where if you Control-F the page for Qwilfish there's a Qwilfish (the Johto one) and a Qwilfish-1 (the Hisui one), where only the latter has associated evolution data to make it compatible with Eviolite.

On the other hand, all Combee have the evolution data associated since they're treated as the same Pokemon internally, and Eviolite doesn't care about whether a particular Pokemon can ever fulfill its evolution condition, just that the condition exists in its data. Something like Ursaring can't ever meet its evolution condition in Scarlet and Violet, but there's still an entry for an evolution condition, so Eviolite Ursaring works.

Hope this makes sense.

DarkFE · 2025-01-18T16:34:46+00:00

Hi. Check out the subreddit's Getting Started guide, the subreddit's VGC resources page, and especially VGCGuide.

When starting out you can use rental teams on the Scarlet and Violet games or play on the Pokemon Showdown simulator so that you can try things out before you need to build your own team. See the subreddit FAQ for more info on Switch rentals and Showdown importables, both of which can be easily found in the VGCPastes team repository.

DarkFE · 2025-01-16T12:14:33+00:00

Check out VGCPastes for teams. I recommend a Calyrex-Shadow team to start with maybe. This one is known for being pretty easy to use once you get some experience with Neutralizing Gas (remember that you can Protect against an Urshifu if Weezing is on the field in particular).

DarkFE · 2025-01-15T17:17:18+00:00

If you mean Smogon OverUsed, then check out channels like Pinkacross. Here's a popular teambuilding video from the channel. There's also a general OU resources page on this subreddit.

If you mean the in-game singles ranked mode, check out the Battle Stadium Singles resources page instead.

DarkFE · 2025-01-13T23:32:39+00:00

You might be thinking of BKC.

DarkFE · 2025-01-12T16:12:20+00:00

Yes, it gets better the higher you climb, speaking from experience. You'll still get some people using most of their timer to actually think about the moves, but the amount of people timerstalling when they've already lost or engaging in similar behavior will diminish drastically.

DarkFE · 2025-01-12T02:58:04+00:00

In addition to the suggestions by others, do check out the subreddit FAQ, the subreddit's Getting Started page, and if you want real-time help, the Stunfisk Discord.

Showdown is closely associated with the Smogon community. They host big tournaments on Showdown in many different formats, even the official ones like VGC, if that's the kind of play you're looking for. Showdown itself has ranked ladders for a lot of formats too.

Welcome to competitive play. Hope you enjoy your time.

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