3rd time lucky? I think so!

[Chasethebase]

Hopefully, this time my RMT migh comply with the rules. I try and try and still somehow forget one point, and it's usually #3. This is because I'm not the greatest at writing long essays about stuff like this. I've been put off writing RMTs for some time because the rules are so strict, yes I can see why the rules are like they are but I just feel that it's hard to get your team rated easily and quickly. Still, Smogon is a great community and I can't knock it for that! So here we go! P.S. I think I've clicked Preview Post about 20 times!

This team spawned out of the fact I always thought I was playing too offensively, and was easily being stalled out by teams across the board. It's gotten me a few wins, but a couple of losses which bugs me. Most of the time when I play the game generally, it's through the in-game elements over and over again. Competitive battling for a period of time has made me notice how I can improve my strategy, even in-game, which opens up new ways of play each time. Now for the team!

Changes are in Green.

***Team Overview***

***In Further Detail***

Blissey @ Leftovers
Nature: Calm
Ability: Natural Cure
EVs: 80 HP/252 Def/176 SpD
- Protect
- Stealth Rock
- Seismic Toss
- Softboiled

An interesting Blissey lead pioneered by Imperfectluck and suggested by Staraptor Call, this moves my team toward a Full Stall, which is better than my usual ideas of having to have a certain number of Phys and Spec sweepers in my team to balance it out. Protect means I can survive possible Explosions, and SR is pretty necessary anyway.

EDIT: Moved Celebi down and added this instead of Gengar

-----

Rotom-H @ Leftovers
Nature: Timid
Ability: Levitate
EVs: 252 HP/160 Def/96 SpA
- Thunderbolt
- Will-o-wisp
- Rest
- Sleep Talk

All hail the underused fan forme! I chose the fan over anything else just because I was using a set that didn't require the forme's signature move. This means I can really confuse anyone I bring it out on because they don't know what it's going to do. Either way, this is a SubRotom which proceeds to Sub, then Charge Beam spam until the SpA is high enough to cause damage, or unless it has fainted beforehand! I might need the washing machine of death to cover a strong fire weakness though.

EDIT: Switched to the Oven forme to force more switches, also changed moveset and EVs to make Rotom more defense orientated.

-----

Vaporeon @ Leftovers
Nature: Bold
Ability: Water Absorb
EVs: 188 HP/252 Def/10 SAtk/60 SDef
- Wish
- Surf
- Ice Beam
- Protect

My Infernape counter and answer to my Fire weakness, Vaporeon can stop Infernape in its tracks, this set was suggested by Crimson Leon so thanks to him I now have a reliable member of my team that doesn't just switch in and wall. This makes the team more interesting as well. You get fed up of using SkarmBliss all the time don't you. Protect over Toxic to ensure a heal for Vappy itself if I need it.

-----

Skarmory @ Shed Shell
Nature: Impish
Ability: Keen Eye
EVs: 252 HP/252 SpD/4 Atk
- Brave Bird
- Roost
- Spikes
- Whirlwind

It's physical wall time, we have the pretty regular Skarmory set, running Spikes and Whirlwind to pass the damage round, with Brave Bird for it to stand up for itself with STAB. Roost is there for your healing, because without it Skarmory wouldn't make much of an effective wall that it does today. Spikes may be changed for Rocks though, depends what my team needs more to cover, Rocks may be better to dish out that extra damage to the fire types that my team is weak to.

EDIT: Changed EV spread to allow more hits across the spectrum.

-----

Celebi @ Leftovers
Nature: Calm
Ability: Natural Cure
EVs: 252 HP/220 Def/36 Spe
- Perish Song
- Grass Knot
- Thunder Wave
- Recover

Celebi has been added to give counters against Swampert and other Water or Ground types that may annoy my team. It used to be in the lead slot but now it's been moved back into the rest of the team to give a more useful role. Thanks to a suggestion by Staraptor Call, I've replaced the lead Celebi with a lead Blissey to see what results occur.

EDIT: Now moved further back in the team to provide better role, swapped Earth Power for Perish Song and changed EVs.

-----

Lucario @ Life Orb
Nature: Adamant
Ability: Inner Focus
EVs: 252 Atk/4 Def/252 Spe
- Close Combat
- Crunch
- Extremespeed
- Swords Dance

Here's the main physical sweeper on my team. Lucario covers quite a few types on this team, and combined with the adamant nature can pack a strong punch to them. Coupled with Extremespeed he's the revenge killer on my team as well. I originally had Crunch on this set to see what effect it has, but Earthquake provided the extra coverage and helps to remove fire types that are a major problem for this team, with 3 members weak to fire. Close Combat is almost necessary on this set just for STAB and the huge power it posesses.

EDIT: Swapped Earthquake with Crunch to prevent walling by Ghosts.

-----

***Threat List***

Azelf: Rotom, Lucario

Breloom: No Counter as of yet

Celebi: Rotom, Skarmory, Lucario, Vaporeon
Dugtrio: Celebi, Vaporeon
Electivire: Lucario, Celebi
Empoleon: Lucario, Celebi, Rotom
Flygon: Vaporeon
Gengar: Lucario
Gliscor: Vaporeon
Gyarados: Rotom
Heatran: Lucario, Vaporeon
Heracross: Skarmory, Rotom
Infernape: Vaporeon
Jirachi: Lucario, Rotom

Kingdra: Vaporeon is the only thing that can stop it.

Latias: Rotom, Vaporeon
Lucario: Lucario, Celebi
Machamp: Celebi, Skarmory
Magnezone: Lucario, Celebi
Mamoswine: Lucario, Vaporeon
Metagross: Lucario, Celebi
Ninjask: Lucario, Rotom
Porygon-Z: Lucario
Rhyperior: Lucario, Celebi, Vaporeon
Roserade: Lucario, Skarmory
Rotom: Lucario
Salamence: Vaporeon
Scizor: Lucario, Rotom, Celebi
Snorlax: Lucario, Rotom
Starmie: Rotom, Celebi
Suicune: Rotom, Celebi
Togekiss: Rotom, Lucario, Vaporeon
Tyranitar: Lucario, Vaporeon
Weavile: Lucario, Skarmory
Yanmega: Rotom, Lucario

Zapdos: No counters yet

 

[Delko]

I would suggest using Crunch over Earthquake on Lucario, otherwise you will be completely by Ghosts.

 

[Chasethebase]

I would suggest using Crunch over Earthquake on Lucario, otherwise you will be completely by Ghosts.

Alright, seems Crunch is the better option after all. Thanks!

 

[Lucalibur]

i am no expert,but i know some important stuff about some of my team nemesis,about blissey,i sugest you dont bother to max out its already high base HP,put 252 evs in both special defense and defense,i know blissey is made to wall special hits,but its not like a special hit is going to kill her anyway,and with 252 defense evs her physical defensive power is doubled! the leftovers 6 evs of course,go to HP,about your infernape problem,i think i got something to help,tought i dont know if you might want to try a vaporeon in rotom place,it give your team a fire resist,counter infernape since close combat and grass knot are not going to do a lot(before nasty plot or sword dance) and can give your team good wishes,i have my own doubts since you already got blissey,but vaporeon is the best infernape counter so you might just want to try.if you want,try that

Vaporeon (F) @ Leftovers
Ability: Water Absorb
EVs: 188 HP/252 Def/10 SAtk/60 SDef
Bold nature (+Def, -Atk)
- Wish
- Surf
- Ice Beam/hp eletric
- Toxic/protect

with this,infernape cant hurt your vaporeon if he is not a nasty plot or sword dance one,and you can ohko him with surf,wish help the party and toxic can be made to stall,ice beam or HP eletric varies,you want to deal with mence or gyara? toxic can be replaced with protect to assure wish heal you,you might just want to replace blissey for this if you dont want to get ride of rotom,or just give wish to your blissey already! but this dont help agains infernape,has i said,ice beam can take care of salamence so we got 2 pokemons that you might have little less problems with now,and flygon can also be deal with ice beam,so we got 3 pokemons covered now....with this,for everything that is sacred,dont bother with HP water on gengar,a lot of pokemons that use fire moves are not fire type itself(and those that are fire type are covered by vaporeon) so you might want to replace HP water for HP fire OR explosion and change the nature for naive(or hasty,depending on your needs) since gengar need the extra speed,he is far to frail to survive a hit and he need speed since life orb is giving him already enough power,HP fire can deal with scizor,who is very common in today metagame but explosion make sure you deal with blisseys that might try to wall you,gengar will die but blissey will take a lot of damage,if not killed by explosion,if you decide to use HP fire,use timid nature since you dont need to use any physical atack,i guess we can also deal with breloom,if you replaced blissey instead of rotom for vaporeon,you might want to try a rest sleep talk rotom,if you decided to replace rotom,you will need to break the skarbliss combo,what is not that useful in today metagame anyway,if you want to try to use rotom,try this one

Rotom-s @ Leftovers
Ability: Levitate
EVs: 252 HP/76 Def/180 SDef
Bold nature (+Def, -Atk)
- Air Slash/shadow ball
- Sleep Talk
- Rest
- Thunderbolt/shadow ball

with air slash and the given evs,this rotom can take breloom spore,survive breloom seed bombs and destroy him with air slash(given that sleep talk chosed air slash) this is about what i can do,i dont know if this will help you or not,but give a try,you dont got anything to lose right?

 

[DJXO9]

If you really want to keep, SubRotom, I would advise switching to Rotom-H, because it forces out so much more. Overheat is a much larger threat to the likes of Scizor, Lucario, and any Steel-type for that matter. A single switch is all you need to possibly pull off your sweep.

Also, on Gengar, I would advise removing HP Water. Their are two notable fire types in OU. One being Heatran, who is hit MUCH harder with Focus Blast. The other is Infernape. Infernape is very frail, and min/min Nape's take a minimum of 84.3% damage. edit: (From Shadow Ball that is) That is a OHKO with a Stealth Rock, and one Life Orb recoil. I would replace HP Water with either Protect or Substitute. Both help a lot in easiing prediction. I would go with Protect, just because LO recoil + Sub recoil will quickly take out Gengar anyways.

 

[Chasethebase]

What if I swapped Blissey out for Vaporeon, giving me a Fire counter, and a reasonable special defender?

Suggestions?

Also, swapping HP Water for Protect and Rotom to H forme for now.

EDIT: After proper reading it seems that I may swap Bliss out for Vaporeon now, it means I cover more pokes and prevent an Infernape sweep.

 

[Scofield]

Looks okay, if you lead with that celebi, try occa berry and more speed (at least 280) to beat heatrans. Also put stealth rocks on celebi, as you need it somewhere on this team. Otherwise, I actually don't like leading with celebi as it doesn't do much as a lead. Leading with rotom, as weird as it sounds might actually be better as you can easily get a sub up against SR leads. Put the 60 spc def evs into speed for vappy to outspeed skarm, scizor, and machamp. If you're going to use protect on gengar, you might as well use hp fire for scizors, besides you already have a great gyara and water type counter in celebi.

 

[Staraptor Call]

This team looks as if it's too stuck in the mindset of having a set number of designated Physical and Special sweepers and walls for the team. While 2/3 of the team looks like the beginning of a stall team, the rest would be more suitable for an offensive team. The team would be better off losing the two sweepers and going full stall.

One thing I notice from the start is that the team has no Stealth Rock or Toxic Spikes. Stealth Rock is practically required on all good teams these days, and your team has nothing to lay it. Strange though it sounds, a Blissey lead might work well. Blissey would replace one of your sweepers and push Celebi back into the rest of the team. The Blissey would serve to set up Stealth Rock and also to counter many opposing leads and force switches. Here is the set:

Blissey@Leftovers
Calm 80 HP / 252 Def / 176 SDef
Natural Cure
-Stealth Rock
-Protect
-Seismic Toss
-Softboiled

Most Physical leads will set up Stealth Rock right away on Blissey and then either attack it Physically or Explode. If you set up Stealth Rock on the first turn, and Protect on the second, many leads will Explode immediately afterward. That's where Rotom-h comes in to take the Explosion.

The Blissey lead may sound strange, but it is successful. Imperfectluck used it on the ladder for a long time, and of course his team was highly successful.

Your team also lacks a way to set up Toxic Spikes, which are good for stall teams in general and are extremely useful to SubRotom. Tentacruel is a Pokemon that is can not only set up Toxic Spikes but can also Spin away entry hazards or use Haze to remove the boosts from the setup sweepers that are so dangerous to stall.

I hope this helped, good luck with your team!

 

[Lucalibur]

Looks okay, if you lead with that celebi, try occa berry and more speed (at least 280) to beat heatrans. Also put stealth rocks on celebi, as you need it somewhere on this team. Otherwise, I actually don't like leading with celebi as it doesn't do much as a lead. Leading with rotom, as weird as it sounds might actually be better as you can easily get a sub up against SR leads. Put the 60 spc def evs into speed for vappy to outspeed skarm, scizor, and machamp. If you're going to use protect on gengar, you might as well use hp fire for scizors, besides you already have a great gyara and water type counter in celebi.

despite what the smogon set says,the only real thing vaporeon will outspeed with this would be skar and scizor,machamp barely run any speed evs at all,skarmory is deal with gengar or rotom,or even vaporeon surf itself and even if you outspeed scizor,you can do little to then since they are imune to toxic and surf is not doing a lot of damage,so he will just u-turn right away at the time he use wish and then he protect right after,if outspeed scizor would really be a must,then just 12 evs are enough,since choice band scizor normaly run 8,and both vaporeon and scizor got the same base speed(65) and SD scizors are becoming rare those days....

This team looks as if it's too stuck in the mindset of having a set number of designated Physical and Special sweepers and walls for the team. While 2/3 of the team looks like the beginning of a stall team, the rest would be more suitable for an offensive team. The team would be better off losing the two sweepers and going full stall.

One thing I notice from the start is that the team has no Stealth Rock or Toxic Spikes. Stealth Rock is practically required on all good teams these days, and your team has nothing to lay it. Strange though it sounds, a Blissey lead might work well. Blissey would replace one of your sweepers and push Celebi back into the rest of the team. The Blissey would serve to set up Stealth Rock and also to counter many opposing leads and force switches. Here is the set:

Blissey@Leftovers
Calm 80 HP / 252 Def / 176 SDef
Natural Cure
-Stealth Rock
-Protect
-Seismic Toss
-Softboiled

Most Physical leads will set up Stealth Rock right away on Blissey and then either attack it Physically or Explode. If you set up Stealth Rock on the first turn, and Protect on the second, many leads will Explode immediately afterward. That's where Rotom-h comes in to take the Explosion.

The Blissey lead may sound strange, but it is successful. Imperfectluck used it on the ladder for a long time, and of course his team was highly successful.

Your team also lacks a way to set up Toxic Spikes, which are good for stall teams in general and are extremely useful to SubRotom. Tentacruel is a Pokemon that is can not only set up Toxic Spikes but can also Spin away entry hazards or use Haze to remove the boosts from the setup sweepers that are so dangerous to stall.

I hope this helped, good luck with your team!

for some reason,metagross lead is becoming more famous and azelf is going down in usage,but despite the look,azelf lead is a great one since it can hurt a lot of stuff,anyway,i doubt metagross would explode on a blissey when his physical moves are doing more then significant damage to her,even more if he got meteor mash instead of earthquake,i know imperfectluck got his high rank with this lead,but this was quite a time ago,and the HGSS moves are out,so pokemons got new nasty surprises(i am beggining to see super fang brave bird crobat leads...) and while metagross wont ohko with meteor mash,your cool name wont change my opnion that he should keep celebi lead(or change for a metagross or azelf one,despite the team somewhat existent sintesy)

 

[Chasethebase]

Ok, thanks for the tips guys, here's my results. I've inserted that Blissey as a lead, removing Gengar, while I'm going to try swapping Tentacruel into Lucario's place and observing the results.

Problem, Lucario provides a counter to too many threats here, if I replace him with Tentacruel it exposes a huge hole in my team to numerous extra threats.

 

[Nosferalto]

Your Celebi's EV spread doesn't seem well thought out, 252/128/128 spreads aren't very good. Try this one: 252 HP / 220 Def / 36 Spe. The Speed EVs allow you to outspeed Jolly Tyranitars running max speed. Max HP is obvious and the rest is poured into Defence. Also, I would suggest you run Perish Song on Celebi as it's a great move on any stall team like yours. Perish Song will allow you to pseudo-haze Curselax or CroCune if one of them is the last Pokemon remaining. This move wil also prove to be useful against Baton Pass teams if your Skarmory goes down.

I would also advise you to change your Rotom-H's moveset and EV spread to a more defensive form since Charge Beam Rotom doesn't fit in a team like this and doesn't have the support it has to have to be able to sweep. Also, you don't want Rotom-H to go down early in the match because that would leave you without your Spin Blocker, and therefore your strategy would be ruined. Since you lack a status absorber, I would strongly suggest you run a Resttalk Rotom-H, as that would also give Rotom a decent form of Recovery.

Rotom-H @ Leftovers
Ability: Levitate
EVs: 252 HP/160 Def/96 SAtk
Bold nature (+Def, -Atk)
- Will-o-wisp
- Thunderbolt
- Rest
- Sleep Talk

The moveset is self explanatory, so I'l just explain the EVs.

Max HP is a must because of Rotom's lackluster HP, this would lso allow him to take hits from both sides of the attacking spectrum. 160 Defence EVs allow Rotom-H to take on Scizor better, they also give an extra point. The rest is dumped into Special Attack for more power wich is enough to OHKO 4 HP Starmie with Thunderbolt and 2HKO standard Vaporeon.

I have nothing else to say, Good Luck with your team.

 

[Tartaros]

Use shed shell on Skarmory, Magnezone's usage is still increasing, so you cannot risk Skarmory, if he dies you wont have anyone that can setup spikes. Have you tried specially defensive skrm? 252 hp/252 spdefe This allows you to survive a lot of special attacks.

 

[Chasethebase]

Ok, changed Skarm's spread to 252SpD and 252Hp, changed Rotom's spread and moves to Xhizors.

Thanks for the tips guys.