Hot n' Cold : VGC 2015 Teambuild!

*psst! this was written before 2016's rule announcement, YIKES*

Hi guys today I am back with another team, this time I’ll be putting forward a team that I have been using and built like in the past 4-5 days or so, I really feel like sharing it with you guys it since I feel like this is a very solid build, I’ll explain my reason of putting a change in them and hopefully explain it my best and leave it easy for you guys to give me feedback! Let’s get started:

Teambuilding thoughts and process:

. I didn’t had a good enough team at this time and was feeling low because the past two teams I built weren’t that solid and I didn’t got good results with them.

. This time needed to start with a pokemon that gave me multiple options to break through my opponents effectively, a mon that could get me in a better position most of the times.

. I was trying to get practice with the Char y, cress, tran and lando core.

. Soon after I found heatran and sableye being best friends and my first picks, I had ideas where the team should go.

. A few days ago I was planning to use a strong offensive pin and a bulky lead combination to adapt to different kinds of teams and let them be synergized.

. Some of the effective ideas in my mind were altogether brought in this team.

The Team:

Sableye @ Mental Herb  

Ability: Prankster  

Level: 50  

Shiny: Yes  

EVs: 252 HP / 4 Atk / 156 Def / 92 SpD / 4 Spe  

Careful Nature  

- Will-O-Wisp  

- Taunt  

- Feint  

- Quash

Sableye was my first pick as a mon that gives me good options to go for against many opponents. On a basic thought I saw sableye as a pokemon that could effectively taunt many opponents as well as burn them to cripple their offensive or supportive potential, with that I was going to add foul play + the un-reliant swagger combination to annoy some mons, basically looking to cover aegislash; as soon as I put heatran and char-y duo on this team I had sufficient answers to this mon, I had gotten a much better idea for the moveslots on this mon, the moves quash and feint. no matter what quash could help me in emergency positions against any pokemon whereas feint was a priceless utility move as man tie when I predict the protect game wrong, feint gave me surety that I landed my hit; it also helps me break through wideguard when using a spread move from my side. Overall sableye proved to be a great mon for me. Now for the spread: I chose these weird looking EV’s to outspeed other sableyes as I have been seeing a constant increase in their usage and this combined with mental herb gave me most of the surety that  win the taunting game. Rest was put somewhat evenly into bulk and 4 leftovers were put into attack considering that they made a waste of EV’s. mental herb also gave me surety to fight against faster taunt users like thundurus, liepard and whimsicott as well encore shenanigans.

Heatran @ Life Orb  

Ability: Flash Fire  

Level: 50  

Shiny: Yes  

EVs: 4 HP / 252 SpA / 252 Spe  

Timid Nature  

IVs: 0 Atk  

- Heat Wave  

- Flash Cannon  

- Overheat  

- Protect

Next up as you know heatran was added, because of these reasons: heatran could counter fairy types really well, I say this because I needed a bit of a backup for my sableye. Further as for a tactic I knew I could always w-o-w my own heatran to get it the flashfire boost, this was something I used effectively in a past team of mine but it was with mega sableye though. Life orb is my item choice because of imagining the tremendous damage output this beast could do, I have witnessed this guy giving me OHKO’es on things like cresselia under the sun, flash fire and orb boosts and you can’t calc it though. Flash cannon is a great move for handling fairy types and tyranitars better in general. Something else unusual is no substitute or earth power, having no earthpower or substitute will be explained further as my team has multiple ways to handle amoonguss and breloom both of which include heatran and sableye as well as some other mons could do this job well, earthpower’s absence will be explained as we head into the team in depth. My simple EV’ing with 252/252/4 timid tran was that I had life orb to cover up for the modest nature’s absence and also to potentially land as attack on opposing heatran’s partner before they OHKO me back.

Charizard-Mega-Y @ Charizardite Y  

Ability: Blaze  

Level: 50  

Shiny: Yes  

EVs: 252 HP / 20 Def / 60 SpA / 4 SpD / 172 Spe  

Modest Nature  

IVs: 0 Atk / 30 SpA / 30 SpD  

- Flamethrower  

- Solar Beam  

- Focus Blast  

- Protect

Charizard-y comes here as the third member of the team bringing a new series of opportunities for this team, mostly heatran. So in a search of a pokemon who could resist fighting type and give bulky water types problems which were the cover ups for heatran I ended up choosing this fire lizard dragon creature thingie… yeah. Everything seems pretty simple about this mon except two things the speed stat I chose and also the focus blast. Flamethrower is here for power, accuracy and opposing flash fires as well as wide guard’s usage. Solarbeam can cover a big chunk of the meta including mons that might trouble this mon. focus blast is my choice after doing a lot of practice with this team I originally had HP ground in this place, it was replaced over these notes I have taken: majority of heatrans I faced and the ones out there are shuca berry variants, HP-ground was always being a 2HKO where as I gave it a free turn sun boost to hit char’s partner at the moment for tons of damage; focus blast could potentially OHKO some frailer variants of this mon; also P-u-P kang was giving me some trouble to tackle this variants focus blast was a good option offensive wise other than spamming hp-grounds, also if I were to come across rare hydreigon I had not been walled by them. I started with Blake’s spread to formulate my charizard as I loved it, I dropped the EV’s down to outspeed max speed timid trans which on his spread was to outspeed max speed adamant landorus’, the rest of EV’s I saved from that were poured into the SpA stat to increase damage output barriers.

Mamoswine @ Choice Scarf  

Ability: Thick Fat  

Level: 50  

Shiny: Yes  

EVs: 36 HP / 252 Atk / 220 Spe  

Jolly Nature  

- Icicle Crash  

- Icicle Spear  

- Rock Slide  

- Earthquake

Mamoswine comes as a replacement for landorus on the original core of landorus, char-y, cresselia and heatran. Why do I choose this mon? I needed a better answer to opposing landorus as I thought they were a big threat to this team, mamoswine is also very effective in beating some specific mons that could give this team trouble, in general thundurus, liepard and whimsicott are all fond of keeping the move taunt or encore all those moves could cripple my teams’ supportive potential and mamoswine can pick up knock outs on all of those. Now for the moves: icicle crash is simple and can’t be explained more than the fact that even at -1 it can pick up knock outs on mence and landorus which I found fun. Rock slide is char-y OHKO and pure flinch hax, 100% accurate STAB EQ is pretty dope with 3x mons immune to ground I often get many opportunities to deal opposing mons damage. Icicle spear is important for some other reasons as well other than the ones mentioned above, on rare focus sash landorus variants it can get me a better chance to beat them, as well as brelooms, smeargle and raichu going on the same lines. As for the EV’ing I chose to opt for max attack with enough EV’s to outspeed a scarfed smeargle that could give me trouble. Mamoswine also created a perfect pin with charizard w/ it’s flamethrower and mamo’s EQ which I really liked playing and it limited my opponent’s options of defensive switch in’s.

Cresselia @ Rocky Helmet  

Ability: Levitate  

Level: 50  

Shiny: Yes  

EVs: 212 HP / 172 Def / 36 SpA / 68 SpD / 20 Spe  

Calm Nature  

IVs: 0 Atk  

- Icy Wind  

- Moonblast  

- Skill Swap  

- Moonlight

Cresselia is an obvious comer in this team, like seriously how could you refrain from using this mon when you have a heatran and charizard on the same team? You simply just can’t dude. I think this is one of the simplest cress’ ever seen about pretty standard however I do still have packed surprises with this mon as well. Let’s just explain what this is and what it does. On every char-y team you see a cress just like this. Icy wind is good speed control, whereas comes the talk of moonlight, sun boosted moonlights can get 80% of cress’ health back to it. Skill swap is something I wanna discuss in detail here; I feel like most of the pokemons are reliant and popular because of their abilities like most of the megas become useless if those are lost, similar to some mons who are crippled if they face a loss of ability. Skill swap could also be helpful in stealing important abilities like opposing flash fire and stuffs as well as pass levitate to heatran or just reset sun whenever needed. Overall cresselia provided from the supportive potential that it needed to, now to discuss moonblast. I had some mons on this team like rotom-w as well as cresselia itself that could do a lot to these mons. My team didn’t had any sufficient answer to these mons also conk was a growing threat to this team especially with guts. Cresselia should answer these all well, exactly I thought that moonblast can be an option to all of these threats that my team has and then cresselia’s own issues were also fixed really well. The EV’ing allows it to survive any common attack in the VGC metagame, the speed is there for outspeeding common 4 speed invested rotom spreads.

Rotom-Wash @ Lum Berry  

Ability: Levitate  

Level: 50  

Shiny: Yes  

EVs: 212 HP / 148 Def / 4 SpA / 132 SpD / 12 Spe  

Modest Nature  

IVs: 0 Atk  

- Thunderbolt  

- Hydro Pump  

- Rest  

- Light Screen

Last up on the team is something I have used the most this whole 2015 season, it’s a rotom-wash! Rotom is my love with a simple bisharp creeper set and all those goodstuffs common moves in it, but this thing is over tons of practice and important notes I took on this team; so first of all let me explain this variants and how I got here: so at first I was running a bulky spread with sitrus berry and protect over rest; I got many problems while playing this pokemon or say with th team in general. I noticed many matches where my opponents got me trap with their last pokemon even if it was a special attacker and I had light screen on, I was noticing to lose to it, I could stall them out with cresselia however it’s offensive presense was never enough to make that game a win for me.i thought of the idea of using rest on rotom after seeing that it had some offensive presence on the field and had the ability to wall up some mons as well and also the fact that using protect on rotom-w never got me in a better of two positions, nevertheless it turned out to be the perfect variant and a bulkier pick for the team. Rest can be helpful to use as whenever I am walled up against a mon so I can make full recoveries and possibly beat them, or on those turns of double protects where the opponent aimed to stall out my sun. I chose lum berry specifically to counter dirty swagger shenanigans and status like sleep, burns or toxic even before they start, this helped out very much in many games of mine. I also choose light screen as my last move as I thought that I had w-o-w part with my sableye so rotom can aid in stopping special attackers, which I thought that my team had trouble with like weaker scalds aimed at mamoswine, thunderbolts on charizard or just spread hyper voices being spammed everywhere. I was very pleased how it turned out in some games putting me in a safer position.

Lead Combinations:

I normally don’t add this section to my posts but I felt like this was a really fun one and I went into using some common lead combinations, let’s take a look at what they were:

Mamoswine + Sabelye:

IDK what was it about this lead but it went as a safe option in my mind for most teams that I did faced, it did really well in the meta I was using it. Whenever seeing double genies I lead this, whenever seeing kang I lead this; as my opponents have to give up on a target and one did the job well. Scenario: opponent leads kang + landorus; either he has to fake out sableye (scrappy) or mamoswine. If it lands on mamo sableye can get a free w-o-w off on any of those two mons, if it lands on sableye; mamo can quite possibly OHKO the landorus.

Cresselia + Rotom:

This was my defensive combination, inspired from what Cybertron was using In the 2014 world championships. Some of my choices on these variants fine-tuned it to my playstyle and ignored some probs that it had. Though it was a kinda Bo3 lead to get tons of information it could also be valuable in Bo1 for taking out information from a tricky or weird looking team, it can even fade some gimmicks away. Rotom-w and cress supported each other real well and I definitely loved playing this lead combination on the field.

Charizard+ Heatran:

Though this one is rare to be played on my end as most teams have a rock or ground type move to eradicate these meta-threats I felt like this was my option to go hyper offensive against things like perish trap or relatively bulky, slower and non-TR modes of the teams. This was absolute monstrosity whenever played effectively and soon was to put me in a 4-2 situation. Loved this one as well!

Conclusion:
So this was it for this team of mine guys, hope you liked it and enjoyed reading through this post. Bye for now!