Teambuilding 102 - What to Consider

[NickCrash]

Place Your [introduction] Here

Greetings everyone and welcome back! This is the second installment of the Teambuilding Guides, and like its predecessor it will be a relatively short and sweet guide on the main principles of ruling the world of pokemon constructing a good pokemon team. Our main focus today will be to enumerate and analyze the factors a person should consider when choosing the members of their poke-squad. This subject is often a source of confusion for many novice builders, and the difficulty lies in their effort to calculate all parameters simultaneously. Worry not, for we're about to overcome this problem by following a few easy steps. So, for the older players to remember, and the newer ones to learn from scratch, here's what people should bear in mind when deciding to build a team.

Time for some... Roleplay

Primarily, pokemon will be chosen to to fulfill a role or 'job' in the team. The role is the 'identity' of the pokemon, and by performing its role, the pokemon will contribute to the overal objective of the team. It is important to note that while the role dictates the set of the pokemon, the pokemon itself is not necessarily limited to that role only. Some pokemon can take more than one role, based on their stats, movepool, ability, and sometimes typing. Others have one role only, in which they specialise.

As we've already discussed here, a team may have its sights turned at a sweep, the support of a core, or a conceptual objective. However, the roles are not limited to the end-goal of the objective, rather they are the way to actually get there. A pokemon role can be generic or specific. Generic roles are common in most teams and have a general job description. Examples of such roles as seen in basic team archetypes are sweepers, wallbreakers, tanks, pivots, spinners/defoggers, etc. Specific roles have more limited quota, as they are usually aimed to stop specific threats from causing serious damage to the team, apply general pressure to teams based on a concept, or work as a support pokemon with a special niche. Examples of such roles are trappers, counters to specific threats like Bisharp and Mega Charizard X, as well as baton pass pokemon like Scolipede. Understanding what roles you want your pokemon to fill makes it much easier to choose the appropriate sets for them.

Just remember that pokemon should be used based on the following combination:

• Role - what the pokemon does for the team
• Viability - how 'good' the pokemon is in general
• Synergy - how well 2 or more pokemon work together

Viability VS Role and Synergy

As I said before, it does not pay off to simply pick the 6 pokemon at the top of the Usage Stats or the Viability Rankings (soon™) and call it a team. More often than not, they will neither have synergy with each other, nor distinct roles, thus leading to a group of pokemon that cannot work with each other. The viability rankings is a list of pokemon that ranks them based on their general effectiveness in the metagame (until we get our own thread about this, consult Smogon for the viability rankings). That means that pokemon of higher ranks (S, A+, A, A-, B+) should be used when applicable. Viability is indicative of a pokemon's potential, but it does not always reflect how good it will be on your team. How good a candidate a pokemon is for your team is determined both by its viability in the metagame and the way it contributes to the objective of your team. You need to consider what the pokemon will be able to do for your team, before choosing it. Sometimes, 'less viable' pokemon are more fitting to a team simply because they fill specific roles in a manner that benefits the whole team much better.

To present an example, Rain teams can be some of the most diverse in terms of pokemon choices, as they are picked from different viability ranks or even different tiers. They can be effective, but some rain-associated pokemon cannot be found among the higher ranks. This is because individually these pokemon do not perform well in the metagame, but when put together in a specific team archetype (here rain) along with other specific partners, their performance skyrockets thanks to a good role division among the members. It may be a farfetched example, but it should give the general idea how a good distribution of Roles can be as important as Viability. Therefore, the builder should always balance the two.

Similarly you should check for synergy in your team. Pokemon need to 'communicate' with each other, first with different roles and then with appropriate synergy. Good cores (or combos) are those that cover each other's weaknesses or damage each other's checks and counters. Examples of good cores are M-Venusaur and Heatran, Togekiss and M-Sableye, Victini and Chesnaught etc. At the same time, bad pokemon duos are those that do not really belong to the same playstyle or they are countered by similar pokemon, making their inclusion in the same team redundant or even problematic. One example is Terrakion and M-Sableye, both great pokemon, but with the former often seen in offensive builds, and the latter being the face of Hyper Stall. Another example of a bad core is M-Gardevoir and Gengar, as they are always blocked by the same pokemon with zero chance of retaliation.

In a few words, encourage good co-operation in the pokemon workspace, and reap the benefits of their work.

Usage Coverage VS Type Coverage

The Usage Stats represents the means that is used to divide the various pokemon in tiers. The tiers themselves represent threatlists backed up by the usage stats of each tier. In other words, it represents the metagame and how often a pokemon is used. For example, in OU, the pokemon that are used more than 3.41% this month in total, which means you'd have approximately 50% chance of seeing them in the opponent's team once every 20 battles, belong to OU, and make it into the OU threatlist for this month.

When adapting a team to counter the metagame, the usage stats are what you should refer to, because it lists what is actually being used, regardless of how good a pokemon actually is. When tailoring a team to a metagame, all that matters is to respond as effectively as possible to what is going to appear most of the time, thus giving your team a more favorable matchup. It goes without saying that your team should not become too focused on specific threats, because it will lose the ability to check everything else. Therefore, instead of trying to make a team that's 'anti-meta', the safest route is to use what's already given to you to your advantage. It is also important, once you've chosen a playstyle for your team, to maintain good general type coverage, offensive or defensive (or both), based on your playstyle.

This is more intuitively noticable from a defensive perspective. A team that's based on mainly countering the most common threats will have gaps on the defensive or gaps in type coverage. Consequently it becomes more susceptible to a low-usage threat. This means that preparing for the top-10 will leave you open to the bottom 60, which means you are more likely to lose to a team that assigns roles and prepares a generic offense and defense, than a team with all the major key threats. Given the diversity of the ORAS metagame, the major threats one could prepare for are way too many for a threat-based team to be successful, not to mention how many UU pokemon tend to work wonders when taking specific roles in certain team archetypes like offense and balance. On the other hand, a more defensively built team should be designed to be more type-based, and would therefore respond much better to the many low-usage threats. Unfortunately this includes the danger of serious struggle against one of the bigger powerhouses of the metagame, so seeking the balance is what most experienced teambuilders are trying to do.

From an offensive point of view, the advantage usually comes from prediction. Using a pokemon in ways the defender has not prepared, using lures, or simply faking a set can give you the upper hand very fast. Remember that Teambuilding and Battling go hand-in-hand. Thus the "hipster" thought is that low-usage pokemon should also be taken into consideration, as they reflect what your opponents are not preparing for. That is why many successful teams have a combination of high usage threats and low usage stuff. The only reason they often lean towards the more commonly used pokemon is due to their overall consistency.

In the end, Metagame and Type Coverage are things that the teambuilder has to balance. Like everything else in life, one can not deviate from the middle too much without experience and expect to have an easy time. Start small, make mistakes, and learn from them. That's the most important thing. Thank you for reading so far.

~ ~ That's all for now folks ~ ~