[PRP][Guide] Guide to Teambuilding in the Draft League Format: Breaking Down a Championship Team

[claduva 0/300]

Hello everyone! For those who don’t know me, I am claduva, the leader of the singles team and the champion of Seasons 1 and 2 of the DMG-INC Draft League. In this guide, I will detail how to effectively teambuild in the draft league format. To do so, I will break down the Season 2 championship winning team and in doing so the key components of a team. The team can be found below, as can the replay. So let’s get started!

The Team and Replay

Spoiler

http://pokepast.es/2c5e9ee0ce97dc32

http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/damageinc-gen7customgame-11329

Hazard Setters

Hazards are arguably the most important moves in competitive singles. They include stealth rocks, spikes, toxic spikes, and sticky web. There are several reasons why they are very important. They can break focus sashes, and sturdy. They can cripple threats like Mega Charizard Y, Volcarona, and Mega Beedrill by doing significant amounts of damage, limiting switches and making revenge killing an easier feat. They can help with momentum by forcing your opponent to focus on hazard removal. Sticky web can allow a Pokémon with average speed to sweep due to increased relative speed. And most importantly, they punish switches. Ultimately, singles comes down to positioning. You want to threaten significant damage as much as possible in addition do resisting your opponent as much as possible. Good and careful players are very good at switching to maintain that advantage. Hazards punish that strategy by forcing your opponents to choose between switching for momentum and suffering from hazards or losing momentum to avoid them. On the championship team I had two hazard setters, with toxic spikes on Weezing and Stealth Rocks on M. Swampert. These served to punish his hazard removal (Pelipper), to prevent toxic/sub-seed stall from Tapu Bulu, and to maintain an advantage in case of heal bell on Lanturn. In that way, I was able to counter a careful play style by threatening damage on every turn, whether I was attacking or not. In summary, not every team needs hazards, but they will often work to your advantage in several ways if you can use them correctly.

Hazard Removers

With hazards being such a critical part of the draft league format, hazard removal becomes all the more essential. Hazard removal options include Rapid Spin and Defog, both of which come with their own pros and cons. Rapid spin will clear all hazards from your side in addition to leech seed. However, as a normal type attack, it is blocked by ghost types. It is also blocked if you faint due to rocky helmet/iron barbs/rough skin/etc. when you use the move. The primary advantage to using this is that you only remove hazards from your side. There are few valuable rapid spinners, so many teams have to go without this option. The other option is Defog. Thanks to new move tutors, a wide variety of Pokémon now have access to defog. It cannot be blocked by ghosts (but can be blocked if your opponent used a move like final gambit of explosion earlier in the turn) and can also remove light screen/reflect/aurora veil from your opponents. The caveat is it also removes any hazards you have set up, so whenever you consider using it you must weight whether you or your opponent is hurt more by the hazards. The secondary effect is also a double edged sword. By decreasing evasion, moves such as hydro pump will have 100% accuracy as long as your opponent stays in. However, this will also activate abilities such as competitive, defiant, and contrary, which can then spiral your game out of your reach, and therefore should be used with caution against a team with one of those abilities. It is also worth briefly mentioning the move Magic Coat and Magic Bounce. Although not overt forms of hazard control, they can bounce any hazards your opponent tries to set up back, which can be a means of deterring your opponent from using hazards. On the team I used, you will see that I had no form of hazard control. This is because my team did not have a rapid spinner and I decided that hazards would be much more helpful to me than my opponent, and therefore defog wasn’t worth running. In the worst case scenario, I could pressure my opponent to go for defog and get rid of the hazards on my side as well. Thus, while hazard removal is easily one of the most important considerations for teams, you must consider your options carefully when determining if and what you want to bring.

Sustain

Some games are decided quickly, with a Pokémon setting up and quickly sweeping through their opponent’s team. Most however are more similar to brawls, where you slowly chip away at your opponent to get into position to win. Having a way to restore HP is therefore essential for being able to sponge several hits and wall certain threats. This can come in the form of items (berries, leftovers, black sludge), moves (Roost, Rest, Recover, Morning sun, Milk drink, Wish, etc.), and abilities (Regenerator). These moves are a staple on most non-hyper-offensive teams. They make the use of moves like substitute more viable. And Roost has a nice secondary effect of removing flying type for the turn, which can make increasing HP against electric, ice, and rock moves much easier. My team had roost on Mandibuzz and Dragonite, Rest on Cresselia, Pain Split on Weezing, Leftovers on Mandibuzz, and Black Sludge on Weezing, all of which let me sponge hits and prevent sweeps from the likes of Mega Mawile. Hyper-offense teams intend to finish games quickly, and don’t need much sustain, but otherwise sustain is essential to making sure you can prolong battles to chip away opponents and maintain good positioning.

Abilities

Frequently, your Pokémon will have certain abilities that benefit you more in certain matchups and sets, and bluffing a different ability can give you an upper hand as well. For example, switching in a Bronzong on a ground type implies Levitate. Your opponent won’t want to risk going for a move that you are immune to, and will likely go for a different move. Thus, you can actually run Heatproof and reap benefits of both abilities as long as you don’t take hits that give it away. An example of this is Clefable, which often runs either Magic Guard or Unaware. If Unaware, you waste your time by setting up. If Magic Guard, you waste your time trying to set up. This example further accentuates the importance of hazards, as if a Clefable comes in when you have hazards up you will instantly know it’s ability based on whether or not it takes damage. My team has two contrasting examples of ability choice. In Dragonite and Mandibuzz, Multiscale and Overcoat respectively are generally the only viable competitive abilities, and therefore don’t warrant much discussion. Galvantula on the other hand has 3 very viable abilities in Compound Eyes, Unnerve, and Swarm. However, with my set, Compound Eyes was useless as all my moves already had 100% accuracy. Swarm wasn’t ideal because the idea was not to get to low HP. Which leaves Unnerve. Although not obviously useful, Unnerve would let me guarantee a OHKO of Pelipper, a critical member of my opponents team due to hazard control, regardless of whether it had an electric reducing berry. Thus, abilities should be carefully considered as they can often make the difference in close matches.

Tanks

Along with sustain comes the need for tanks. Sustain is not going to do much good if your team can all be easily one-shot. In order to make safe switches, you need to know you can take whatever hit is incoming. It is generally good to have a special tank and a physical tank depending on your opponent’s team constitution. For example, while Blissey can take special attacks for days, it isn’t going to survive a strong physical attack, so you need to be prepared for that. These also commonly carry status moves, which can cripple your opponents. My team had Weezing as a physical tank to counter M. Mawile and Tapu Bulu in addition to crippling them with Will-o-Wisp, and Cresselia as an all around tank that could set up calm minds and win if the timing was just right. Again, not all teams use tanks, but in my personal opinion they are central to most consistent teams due to not having to worry about predictions quite as much.

Clerics

The last defensive component that is commonly needed is a cleric. This allows for your team to not worry as much about status moves since your cleric can heal them off with aromatherapy or heal bell. This is especially essential for Toxic on tanks and Burns on Physical sweepers. Clerics also commonly run moves like Wish, Lunar Dance and Healing wish to be able to provide further support to your offensive Pokémon in need of more health. Good clerics however are few, as they often must be tanky in addition to having decent offensive prowess to prevent getting set up on, so many teams will not have one. My best option on my team was Lunar Dance Cresselia, which is limited and contributes to Cresselia’s 4-move syndrome. So my team is without a cleric, which certainly would have been helpful to ensure Mandibuzz could function better once it was toxiced, which is one of the few ways to break through some tanks. So clerics can often not fit on teams, but should at least be a consideration if it fits in a specific matchup.

Volt-Turn

Since positioning and momentum are so important, moves like Volt Switch, U-turn, and Parting Shot are great options to use. They can cover for any switches your opponent might make so you can maintain optimal positioning (With parting shot you have to use the same caution as you do with defog due to its ability to activate Competitive, Defiant, and Contrary). These are often quite useful on choice scarf sets as leads so that you are guaranteed good positioning on your first turn. Scarf volt switch does have to be used carefully though because you have the potential to lock yourself into a move that does no damage if your opponent switches to a ground type. On the team above, I used Galvantula as a lead because it outsped my opponents whole team, he had no ground types, and I was guaranteed to get significant damage off with life orb. I was then able to switch into Mandibuzz, which effectively counters Mesprit and threatens to defog any first turn stealth rocks. Mandibuzz also had U-turn, which would give me further advantage if M. Mawile was brought in to try to set up on it. Although not essential, Volt-Turn is easily a great way to maintain the upper hand in a battle.

Speed Creeping

Perhaps the most difficult part of team-building is assigning EVs. Frequently players will simply use 252/252/4 distributions, which is often wasted. Generally, you do not need 252 speed EVs to outspeed relevant threats that you are able to outspeed in the first place. For example, Dragonite was able to outspeed the common sets of everything barring Tapu Bulu, Arcanine, Flygon, and Mesprit. This allowed me to add additional bulk in HP and to use Modest rather than Timid nature, which therefore increased damage output. That point is especially relevant with choice scarfers (all teams should generally have one good scarfed revenge killer unless, like in my team, you had a Pokémon that outsped everything relevant to begin with), as they can generally outspeed all threats and still have an attack boosting nature. It will let weather sweepers to outspeed most scarfers and maintain some bulk. Thus you should evaluate every EV you put in speed to make sure it is doing something. Sometimes mind games may come into play. If a team has a max speed of 400, I may set my scarfer to 401, to have maximum bulk. Knowing this, my opponent may set a scarfer to 402 to beat my scarfer. There is obviously no way to know what your opponent will bring but this point shows that putting a few extra EVs in speed can let you outbuild and then beat your opponent. To help with this, I have built the following spreadsheet, which has drop down boxes to input Pokémon so you can see max speeds of your opponents Pokémon at neutral, +1, and +2. You can copy the sheet to your drive and use it for match preparation. This lets you quickly determine what speeds you need and what you can realistically outspeed in addition to what you realistically can’t, and therefore shouldn’t worry about when determining investment.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vukITShHvzDp7IuUaV2kPM01p9rPEOLE0KWT7qLBpuE/edit#gid=1318121854

For more about EV optimization, I highly recommend this article, which although written for VGC is relevant to singles as well.

Wallbreakers

Just like you need tanks, you need something that can beat tanks. You can accomplish this in a few ways. First, with moves like toxic. This is a guaranteed way to keep most tanks from staying in indefinitely and whittling away your HP because eventually they won’t be able to recover off what they are losing. The exception here is Pokémon like Celesteela and Toxapex, which generally can’t be toxiced and are more susceptible to moves like leech seed. Another option is something that hits so hard and diversely that any mon wont be able to keep up with recovery. Good examples of this include Kyurem-Black, Tapu Koko, Mega Mawile, and Mega Medicham. Even good tanks will struggle to take two hits from these Pokémon. The last option is set up sweepers. Your dragon dance, swords dance, calm mind, nasty plot type Pokémon fall into this category. These are Pokémon that can quickly snowball a game if allowed to set up, which forces your opponent to play around it accordingly. A classic example is my infamous sweep of Revez with Reuniclus, which he simply couldn’t kill or counter due to his lack of a dark type. On my team, my main wallbreakers were Swampert, which hits so hard in rain that it has few switch-ins to it’s dual STAB, and Cresselia, which could Calm Mind and Sleep Talk through many teams without a good physical wall breaker. Without options like this, you are just asking to be set-up fodder that won’t be able to break a threat before it sweeps through your whole team.

Unpredictability

The last component of teambuilding, and perhaps the most fun part, is introducing unpredictability. When you use unconventional sets you are harder to predict, which increases your chance of winning. I have personally lost a game to @TheGamer777 because I didn’t account for him to bring Fire Blast on his Tauros. If you only bring standard Smogon sets, YOU WILL LOSE QUICKLY AND YOU WILL LOSE OFTEN. Everyone knows Exploud loves to run specs, so its easy to counter that set, which can then lead to you locking yourself into an inopportune move. You could try silk scarf or life orb instead! On my team, you find a few unconventional sets., most notably on Dragonite. Few would argue that the best Dragonite sets are Choice Band, Dragon Dance, and weakness policy. But those are easy to prep for, especially when your opponent has dual intimidate like my opponent did. So despite bringing Dragon Dance to every match this season, I brought a special set, which paid significant dividends. In addition to this, I brought mixed Mega Swampert with Sludge Wave to surprise Bulu and Rain Dance on Galvantula to have the option of a late game rain sweep possible. Another useful way to be unpredictable is also in what you don’t bring. If for a whole season you have been depending on a certain Pokémon to be your primary offensive option, odds are your opponent will prep heavily for it. If you don’t even bring it, your opponent now has a significant amount of wasted prep for a Pokémon that isn’t on your team, leaving less options for what you did bring. My path through the playoffs was helped by leaving Dragonite on the bench for the first two games, making my opponents’ several ice moves virtually useless. The moral of the story is make sure to have fun with your sets. In some cases, the standard set is primed to do amazingly. In others however, your opponent knows exactly what you brought and can counter you perfectly.

Final Tips

Teambuilding is definitely a learned skill, and can take a lot of time to get good at. And even then it is common to overlook something in prep what causes an autoloss. Sometimes the matchup is terrible, and no matter what you do your prep can never be sufficient. At the end of the day, good team-builders aren’t necessarily good battlers and good battlers aren’t necessarily good team-builders. In a draft league you get the chance to get good at both, and I hope this guide gets you in the right direction. Just remember to stay thorough, resilient, and creative, and you will find success. If you need further tips or advice feel free to PM me or any of the singles team-members. The more eyes that see your prep, the better it will be.

-claduva

@13thShade @Nitro @Eastonn8

[Guest Eastonn8]

Approved.

Will put the lessons into good use for the upcoming season :)

[13thShade 4,323/5000]

Approved.

Will use strats to eat Gamer.

[Nitro 2,318/3200]

Approved.

@Hiredguns doesn't know what's coming to him this week!

[Guest ethanator2008]

Ooh, definitely gonna give this a thorough reading before I build my next team.

[Guest KadazVGC]

I'm close to joining my first draft league so this will help a lot thanks! Also looking forward for the next DI draft!

[Hiredguns 2,964/3200]

9 hours ago, Nitro said:

Approved.

@Hiredguns doesn't know what's coming to him this week!

I have the power of God and anime on my side!

[Guest lutonmad]

Excellent read, thank you!

[Salieri 0/300]

Turned this into an excel document and added to my existing one. (: