[The Time Has Come! Our Pokemon Reborn Adventure!]

Aww yes, ya boi is finally here (sort of)

[I Need Help Beating Shelly!]

Try having your Swampert hold a Telluric Seed. Send it out after your first mon goes down (whatever that is) so that you don't get hit with intimidate and then you should be able to rock slide through her team fairly easily. You can use potions to heal it on your other turn as well.

 

If you don't have any Telluric Seeds, check this thread:

 

As a side note, you should replace water gun on Swampert with Water Pledge (the tutor is in one of the buildings at the top of Lapis Ward next to the gym) since it has double the base power.

[Tell Me Your Favorite Pokemon! ~CLOSED~]

Gotta be Camerupt for being a dopey looking murder-camel. Name is up to you..

[E18 Gym Battle Difficulty]

Spoiler

Hardy, to me, felt like a weaker version of Charlotte. Same general hyper offense strategy, but trading a lot of the raw power that Charlotte brought for even higher speed tiers. Add in being completely locked to physical attacks, less coverage moves, mono-rock being fairly limited, and the player having access to better/more teams at this point in the game and Hardy feels really underwhelming. I pretty much run a hyper offense team myself, but it was really easy to wait out the 5 turns of sand even without items (detect stall plus a couple intimidates) and then clean up, even though my team was basically the type that Hardy is intended to beat.

 

I actually quite like Hardy's team as it does a good job of flipping the standard for rock type gyms, although I think a couple of the items are slightly suspect. I can't see any reason why neither lycanroc (especially the dusk form which is supposed to be the ace) has a life orb.  A z-move would change things as well.

 

I think the real problem is that the field just doesn't help Hardy enough. Off the top of my head, maybe change the field effect so that sand is guaranteed 8 turns on the field and can't be overwritten by other weather effects. This would pretty much force adaptation for pure offence teams. If you wanted to take it a step or two further (or in a different direction) after that, add more stomping tantrum/earth power coverage and give those field effect boosts as well. It's a real shame that for all the smack Hardy talks about steel types, he gets completely crushed by them and adding some extra coverage moves could help change that.

 

[E18- Team Help - Early story battles]

EV's/IV's/Nature are definitely significant, at this point in the game, but are not some magic formula that will make any team capable of winning any battle in game. What a proper spread will do, is it will ensure your team performs how you expect them to and will increase your consistency. Most of the time in Reborn, you can compensate by using boosting items and potions if your strategy is sound. 

 

That is not to say that you shouldn't do it. Like Rayu said, EV training will help a lot if you aren't experienced in competitive play. If you do want to try to EV train, my recommendation is to use the power weight items from the department store and farm the woobats and noibats in the shadows under the railnet since they always give 1 speed EV and you can guarantee their spawns.

Spoiler

provided that you haven't donated for the railnet reconstruction yet, in which case your best bet will probably be via fishing somewhere.

Fishing is also a pretty good option, but i don't know all the fishing tables so i'm afraid I can't tell you which spots are best.

 

As for recommendations for the fight

Spoiler

Having Donphan set up stealth rocks and rapid spin away the sticky web will probably help a lot. You can switch in Arcanine a couple times to intimidate Cain's Alolawak into uselessness and then ignore him while focusing down Shelly's team as well.