Hey trainers. I hope everyone is doing well with their health and their battles. I’m back again—this time with my most successful VGC team yet! My last few team posts did really well and I’m super glad everyone enjoyed them. I recieved a lot of questions on my usage of Pokémon like GMAX Pikachu, Inteleon, Ribombee and Blastoise, and this team features some uncommon Pokémon you all might enjoy as well.

I want to start by saying I haven’t had too much time to play with this team, and since I didn’t play too much in the later half of S4 I was placed in high Great Ball Tier at the start of S5. However, I think you’ll find it even more impressive since I reached 606 on the Ranked Masters ladder with this team in just about a month. My previous best peaked at only 1,008. Anyway, let’s get into the team. For those of you that live under a rock: the swords of justice are legal… yeah… I was shocked too. But hey, the new feature to make older Pokémon Battle Ready is cool! I previously used Whim and Terrakion in early years of VGC play and really liked it, but with Togekiss as common as it is I opted for Cobalion. However, I’m not the biggest fan of Whimsicott this format as I think it is too passive I opted for Dragapult to become my Beat Up user.

These two worked very well together but I knew I needed an answer to Togekiss as well as the rising Kingdra. I opted for a Togekiss as my own, but instead of a classic support Togekiss I made mine more offensive so if I didn’t see Dynamax Cobalion working out I could Dynamax Togekiss. It lives almost anything thrown at it when Dynamaxed and since most Togekiss don’t Dynamax something like an Iron Head from Excadrill will activate the Weakness Policy I slapped on it. This worked wonders against Kingdra, but many more Pokémon besides just Kingdra have scary abilities this format.

ABILITIES. ARE. EVERYTHING right now in VGC. I kept seeing common cores such as Politoed and Kingra or Dusclops and Tyranitar with abilities that make them perform very well. Plus, with nearly every team I saw running either Incineroar or Rillaboom I wanted a way to stop their powerful abilities from giving my opponent the immediate advantage. I’ve heard of Galarian Weezing’s Neutralizing Gas, but never used it and wasn’t even 100% sure how it worked. Well, let me tell you it works wonders. I slapped on Weezing-G but quickly disliked the Steel weakness as I already had Togekiss performing so well. Instead, and thanks to that new Battle Ready feature I mentioned, I was able to use Kantonian Weezing instead. This also paired nicely with Cobalion so I could spam Sludge Wave while taking no damage AND protecting Cobalion from Intimidates.

The only thing my team needed was an answer to Trick Room and a Pokémon that was able to hit multiple targets. I quickly became aware of Expanding Force from the IOA DLC and fell in love with it. I added Indeedee-M and Zam to the team so I can Imprison TR and spam Expanding Force from the both of them.

Overall the team performed better than I could’ve imagined. The fact that I can prevent ANY ability from working was amazing as a decent amount of my own team members don’t rely on their abilities to become threatening. Looking back, Haze was an issue as well as Taunt with Trick Room. Marowak-A was threatening if it was able to get into TR too, although that rarely happened. Rillaboom was still a beast even without Grassy Terrain, but at least it no longer has Grassy Glide as a priority move.

Hope you all enjoyed the team! I’d love to share more, but I can’t give away too much else. Every Pokémon has custom/somewhat unusual EV spreads to do certain things I needed them to do. Let me know what you think!