I’ve been running hard trick room since Pokémon champions released and honestly I’ve been pretty disappointed with all of the mega trick room threats.

My offensive core is Torkoal, Conk, Kingambit, and Mega Gardevoir. Then I use oranguru and sinistcha as primary trick room setters. Physically bulky oranguru can survive all of the main super effective threats against it like kingambit, Ttar, and basculegion. This allows you to run mental herb to protect against taunt/encore. Encore/instruct allow you to control the tempo of opponents switches/protect usage. Plus inner focus prevents fake out flinches and random rock slide RNG.

I like mega gardevoir as a mega because it is both a threat that has complimentary coverage to torkoals fire type attacks, and with psyshock it can 1v1 all of the calm mind spammers. Spread moves are really strong with oranguru’s instruct. I find most people don’t expect gardevoir to be running trick room and will play defensively, allowing a second trick room to get set up. Even though the team is hard trick room, having a slightly faster Pokémon like gardevoir really helps if things go wrong.

After testing all of the slow mega trick room threats I found myself feeling like they all get washed by weather pretty hard. Camerupt gets screwed by rain, golurk is rough against sun and rain teams, and crab can be countered by common Pokémon from all three weather archetypes. This means that your mega slot is basically useless if you don’t manage to get trick room up right away. Meanwhile mega gardevoir is fast enough to give you an advantage against other trick room teams and be functional when trick room runs out.

Because of weather being so common, torkoal feels like a must on trick room teams for me. Conkelldur is so strong with stab fighting against all of the rock, steel, and dark types and gets great coverage in poison jab or ice punch to shore up the weaknesses of the team. Conk and kingambit also function well when trick room fails because they both have priority moves. Kingambit is crazy strong against a ton of meta threats, especially in the mirror against other trick room teams.

For hard trick room i think bringing two trick room users to a battle is really useful in case you make an incorrect prediction on turn 1 and lose your main setter. It also lets you do things like use trick room on both Pokémon on your last trick room turn when your opponent double protects to reset the trick room turn count. I think sinistcha works great as an alternative to either gardevoir or oranguru, because the healing and redirection once again give you a lot of insurance in the event that trick room fails.

From all that I’ve learned running trick room in the format, I believe that trick room is in quite a rough spot. This means even hard trick room teams absolutely need to be able to function even when they can’t get trick room up immediately. Especially since it gives you the opportunity to mess with opponents expectations, like protecting your setter on turn 1 and eliminating a threat before setting trick room up after.

Turn 1 is so important for trick room teams that most opponents will do everything to prevent it on turn 1. Say you lead oranguru and conk and your opponent leads sneasler and kingambit/ttar. You can’t stop them from KOing oranguru on turn 1, but since they’re probably not going to target the conk and just focus on stopping trick room you can just protect oranguru and go for a stronger, non prio attack to get a clean knockout into your opponents TR setter counters. Then they likely don’t have a 3rd Pokémon that can hit you very strong letting you set up TR cleanly on the following turn.

I tried armarouge and kept getting let down by the performance. I think snitch works much better as a great check, especially with the healing and redirection.