Hello Hat Lovers!
I placed third at Oregon Regionals. I used more or less the same team as I did at the MSS.
After the MSS I tried out Drifblim teams. I used Fini/Drifblim/Garchomp in the IC that was focused on setting up Tailwind and Swaggering Garchomp to facilitate sweeps. This was fun and while I did well with the team (22-4 in the IC) it didn’t seem like Regionals material. I could see a lot of flaws that my opponents weren’t exploiting due to the best of one setting.
When I saw teams similar to my MSS team picking up top finishes around the world I decided to try out these teams in order to understand how they played. I kept Koko, P2, Gigalith and Arcanine with a revolving door of Pokemon filling the last two slots. I didn’t like using the common stand-ins like Gyarados, Kartana or Lele. I also tried out a number of other Pokemon before coming to the conclusion that the original six were what worked best for me.
The QR Code for this team in available.
Choice Specs | Thunderbolt | Dazzling Gleam | Volt Switch | Hidden Power Fire | |
Eviolite | Return | Ice Beam | Recover | Trick Room | |
Rockium Z | Stone Edge | Rock Slide | Earthquake | Protect | |
Groundium Z | Earthquake | Poison Jab | Swords Dance | Protect | |
Mago Berry | Flare Blitz | Extreme Speed | Snarl | Protect | |
Leftovers | Heavy Slam | Flamethrower | Leech Seed | Protect |
At a glance this team looks very standard. What sets it apart is the defensive the more frail Pokemon are trained. Tapu Koko is known as the frail Tapu but I expect mine to survive pretty much any non Z-move. Garchomp and Celesteela survive common attacks that exploit their weaknesses. Porygon2, Arcanine and Gigalith are all super bulky by nature.