1 and 3
-
Welcome to Smogon! Take a moment to read the Introduction to Smogon for a run-down on everything Smogon, and make sure you take some time to read the global rules.
-
The leader of this section is Isaiah.
-
Congrats to the winners of the 2023 Smog Awards!
Project SV ZU Teambuilding Competition
- Thread starter diegoyuhhi
- Start date
This week as well ended with a tie! Congrats to Joethezombie and TomatoZause for getting 3 votes each.
Next week will be up tomorrow!
Next week will be up tomorrow!
Last week, many of the ZU resources were updated, namely we got a new Viability List, which ranks mons in Top, High, Mid, and Low, based on how viable they are in the current meta.
Build a team featuring only mons in Mid/Low (or Unranked) on the VL and post it in this thread with a brief description.
Deadline is Friday 27th at 10pm GMT+2.
Have fun!
Build a team featuring only mons in Mid/Low (or Unranked) on the VL and post it in this thread with a brief description.
Deadline is Friday 27th at 10pm GMT+2.
Have fun!
https://pokepast.es/214170805ed6e02a
Built a team using only low tier mons because why not. Vigoroth isn't listed in the thing so its low tier by technicality :), it'd prob go in Mid Tier. I started with the core of Mareanie Sandslash cause it just covered a bunch of util options and I added Vig after I noticed it missing. I wanted a revenge killer so I chose scarf goth because I'm a big fan of trick scarf. Spidops was added for another revenge killing option, knock and spikes just to help soften teams up for Goth / Vig to clean. I didn't want Sandslash to be spread so thin so I added Sudo as a rocker and bulky option to check random things and it allowed me to fit superfang on Sandslash which is a neat option.
Have fun if you end up testing out the team, although it shouldn't win much I think you'll be able to cheese a couple games and its pretty fun.
E: Anytime I mention Sandslash it should be sandshrew, must've been late when I wrote this im leaving it cause its funny.
Last edited:
-
-
-
-
-
why make a team with low tiers when you can make a team of unranked trash?
Jokes aside, this was mostly to experiment with sets, and I can happily say it worked surprisingly well. hippo is there to set sand and get the sweepers in, shellos, sanshrew, and gastly are all heavy hitters and have either the speed or power to do fairly well. Mudbray is unbreakable in the endgame sometimes, and can win just by being fat, and i took the grimer set from my week two team because its good and underated.
This is a very fun, very stupid team, but it went 5-5 against mostly 1200+ players, and that was with rollout instead of rock slide on shrew.
Jokes aside, this was mostly to experiment with sets, and I can happily say it worked surprisingly well. hippo is there to set sand and get the sweepers in, shellos, sanshrew, and gastly are all heavy hitters and have either the speed or power to do fairly well. Mudbray is unbreakable in the endgame sometimes, and can win just by being fat, and i took the grimer set from my week two team because its good and underated.
This is a very fun, very stupid team, but it went 5-5 against mostly 1200+ players, and that was with rollout instead of rock slide on shrew.
-
-
-
-
-
Stonjourner is probably the best pokemon in the tier, which does not bode well for physical attackers without supereffective stab. However, stonj can easily be overwhelmed, which was my main idea when building this team. Sevi and Greedent are both fun mons to use and are both checked by the big rock. Prinplup is a nice defensive pivot and dartrix can help with hazards. Specs is imo the only good eiscue set. Pupitar sets rocks and absorbs status and blocks volt switch.
Replays:
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen9zu-1976266468
Replays:
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen9zu-1976266468
Last edited:
I wanted to play specs Drakloak because draco meteor go brrrrrrr. However, special walls don't care about draco meteors / shadow balls. In that case, Drakloak can act as a pivot to bring out Raboot, which can take care of them. It can also pivot back to drakloak. Now I need some entry hazards and something that could break teams even more. I decided to go with Sudowoodo (there weren't that many choices tbh 
). Now I wanted a special wall that could pivot (I think you can start to see the point of this team :D). Eelektrik was my choice. It also provided a way to knock eviolites, which is mandatory on every team (IMO). At this point, I realized that my team had no switchs-in to stonjourner. I added Sandslash, which can set up rocks, remove hazards and check stonjourner. I wanted the last slot to be a cleaner, and maybe to P I V O T. Dewott is a perfect fit, as it gives a water resist that the team lacked.
). Now I wanted a special wall that could pivot (I think you can start to see the point of this team :D). Eelektrik was my choice. It also provided a way to knock eviolites, which is mandatory on every team (IMO). At this point, I realized that my team had no switchs-in to stonjourner. I added Sandslash, which can set up rocks, remove hazards and check stonjourner. I wanted the last slot to be a cleaner, and maybe to P I V O T. Dewott is a perfect fit, as it gives a water resist that the team lacked.
(Kind of a last minute build but eh)
My idea with this team was simple: Knock spam + Hazard Stack
Initially the team aimed to sweep with dd dragonair late game but that didnt work out as well for me mainly cuz of lacking sqwak switchin,hence nose.
Nosepass and Alolan grimer are the defensive centrepieces and probably the most important tools to keep the long game going.
Having double taunt and tspikes absorber lessens the burden from sandshrew to use spin as often, getting chipped in the process.
The team focuses more on defensive profile and doesnt have a scarfer, instaed having drakloak as spinblock and natural speed control.
My idea with this team was simple: Knock spam + Hazard Stack
Initially the team aimed to sweep with dd dragonair late game but that didnt work out as well for me mainly cuz of lacking sqwak switchin,hence nose.
Nosepass and Alolan grimer are the defensive centrepieces and probably the most important tools to keep the long game going.
Having double taunt and tspikes absorber lessens the burden from sandshrew to use spin as often, getting chipped in the process.
The team focuses more on defensive profile and doesnt have a scarfer, instaed having drakloak as spinblock and natural speed control.
This week's building phase is over, it's now time to vote for the best team!
Team 1: Low-tier Hazard Stack by love chants
Team 2: Unranked Sand Offense by Joethezombie
Team 3: 
Specs Eiscue + Seviper BO by sinnabyss
Team 4: Specs Drakloak Balance by Ruby4
Team 5: Nosepass Bulky Hazard Stack by risin_glory
Vote for your two favourite teams!
Deadline to vote is Sunday 29th at 10pm GMT+1.
Team 1:
Low-tier Hazard Stack by love chants Team 2:
Unranked Sand Offense by Joethezombie Team 3:
Specs Eiscue + Seviper BO by sinnabyss Team 4:
Specs Drakloak Balance by Ruby4 Team 5:
Nosepass Bulky Hazard Stack by risin_glory Vote for your two favourite teams!
Deadline to vote is Sunday 29th at 10pm GMT+1.
3,4
Ruby(team 4) and glory( team 5)
Swalot was the face of SV ZU during all the first months of the meta thanks to its amazing offensive and defensive utility, with its ability Sticky Hold making it able to absorb Knock Off and its access to moves like Swords Dance, Toxic, Encore, AcidPress, and many more, and after rising to PU during September shifts it’s now back into the tier. Despite powercreep hitting ZU quite hard due to all the mons from DLC1 that dropped during November shifts, Swalot can still hold its own thanks to its amazing tools, both old ones and new ones like Knock Off.
Build a team featuring Swalot and post it in this thread with a brief description.
Deadline is Friday 10th at 10pm GMT+1.
Have fun!
-
-
-
-
-
This is probably the best ZU team I've ever made, let me explain why it works, because I'm going to go pretty in depth.
Swalot:
The big boy himself, swalot is the physical glue of the team, with a pretty standard acidpress set to remove items, absorb knock off, stop setup sweepers with encore. tera dark allows him to encore psychic attacks and get free setup to potentially just wall out most of someone's team.
Tinkatuff:
Tuff is most typically my lead, and a powerful special wall. With rocks, encore, twave, and knock off, it has a good option for whatever situation it finds itself in, as nothing particularly likes being knocked or twaved, encore hurts setup sweepers, and getting rocks up is always a major priority in game. I used to use play rough over encore, but I never found myself ever clicking it, so I swapped it out despite also having encore on swalot. I picked tera water for ground and fire attacks, but I almost never tera tink unless its a truly horrible lead matchup
Rotom-Fan:
Ive gotten a lot of people saying that this set is trash, so im going to explain it here and why it has worked for me so far. I used to use a very similar set on rotom heat in monotype, as in an offensive metagame rotom would often survive an important hit and then cripple whatever fast, frail attacker wanted to run away with the game, and with the meta down in ZU shifting, I decided to give it another go. This mon has the unique characteristics of being ground immune, having trick, and a pivot move, something no other mon has in this meta, and it allows me to use slow volt switches to bring in dugtrio, links, or owl for free and allow them to do their thing. this can easily be achieved with eel or ampha, but rotom being ground immune means it has more options to get into battle for free to do that slow volt switch, and having trick means that it can cripple a fast attacker to be easily revenge killed. you could make an argument that boots is almost always better, but fan usually only has to come in 1-3 times each match, and I have personally found my games go quick enough that rotom can still function without being heavily crippled by rocks. The last two moves are air slash, a good stab option with flinch cheese to get undeserved kills, and willo, to cripple any physical attacker or put smthn else on a timer. Tera steel is the obvious option here, and can enable rotom to live a hit and fire off a willow or trick as needed.
Dugtrio:
Earthquake spam is honestly fantastic right now, with a lot of mons being either weak to ground or frail enough to die anyway. Mons like swalot, ston, camel, and tink all get hit like a truck, and unless you have a ground immune, there are not a lot of relevant switchins at the moment. Stone edge is there to slap flying types, and is best used against a mon that will die to it if they dont switch out, preventing you from being hard punished for not clicking eq if they dont switch. Tera fire tera blast covers the grass matchup, with sucker punch to have a little priority. I chose adamant here because very few mons outspeed adamant but are slower than jolly, and the attack boost allows you to pick up some kills you would otherwise miss.
Noctowl:
Noct is the pirmary special attacker on the team, with a nasty plot set and tinted lens its very hard to switch in to if it picks up a kill. Its very good at taking out bulky mons, with tera blast being a solid attack before and after tera due to noctowls part normal typing. Air slash is good flying coverage without hurricanes 30% miss chance and heat wave cleans up steels that resist normal and flying, as well as ice types. Not a whole lot to say, just a solid pokemon all around
Falinks:
Finally, we got falinks, in contention for a quick ban and defiantly a very strong pokemon at the moment. This is a pretty standard NR set, but I swapped out the item to hard counter other falinks sets with tera ghost to be immune to CC and not be trapped by NR. I picked poison jab over iron head because I personally prefer a 30% poison chance to a 30% flinch chance.
Weaknesses:
This team has a little less immediate speed control than others, so scarfers and mons naturally faster than adamant duggy can be fairly troublesome. Thankfully identifying the enemy scarfer is usually straight forward, often being lycan, ndd, fan, or saws. Having that info can allow you to properly manage your tera and pick off the scarfer as needed, opening the game for a quick win after.
Replays w/ elo
Vs BlueBirdtheAltaria, 1254 - horribly miss-played the first turn but dragged it back
Vs Bubsy 64, 1498 - battle revolved around positioning of dugtrio, a clean double on turn 16 gave me the momentum I needed to secure the win
Vs Paratrooper69, 1280 - got an early setup opportunity with noctowl and a few kills, was hard for them to come back after that
Vs LTfarmington, 1320 - tricking the macargo gave me the momentum to get the battle rolling and secure a win with tera dark swalot
Vs Paratrooper69, 1310 - duggy cleans
Vs Fish Anemometer, 1500+ - caught him off guard with spdf rotom to kill scovillian, cost him the game.
Will probably add more replays
I also hit my highest elo ever using this team, passing 1300.
Swalot:
The big boy himself, swalot is the physical glue of the team, with a pretty standard acidpress set to remove items, absorb knock off, stop setup sweepers with encore. tera dark allows him to encore psychic attacks and get free setup to potentially just wall out most of someone's team.
Tinkatuff:
Tuff is most typically my lead, and a powerful special wall. With rocks, encore, twave, and knock off, it has a good option for whatever situation it finds itself in, as nothing particularly likes being knocked or twaved, encore hurts setup sweepers, and getting rocks up is always a major priority in game. I used to use play rough over encore, but I never found myself ever clicking it, so I swapped it out despite also having encore on swalot. I picked tera water for ground and fire attacks, but I almost never tera tink unless its a truly horrible lead matchup
Rotom-Fan:
Ive gotten a lot of people saying that this set is trash, so im going to explain it here and why it has worked for me so far. I used to use a very similar set on rotom heat in monotype, as in an offensive metagame rotom would often survive an important hit and then cripple whatever fast, frail attacker wanted to run away with the game, and with the meta down in ZU shifting, I decided to give it another go. This mon has the unique characteristics of being ground immune, having trick, and a pivot move, something no other mon has in this meta, and it allows me to use slow volt switches to bring in dugtrio, links, or owl for free and allow them to do their thing. this can easily be achieved with eel or ampha, but rotom being ground immune means it has more options to get into battle for free to do that slow volt switch, and having trick means that it can cripple a fast attacker to be easily revenge killed. you could make an argument that boots is almost always better, but fan usually only has to come in 1-3 times each match, and I have personally found my games go quick enough that rotom can still function without being heavily crippled by rocks. The last two moves are air slash, a good stab option with flinch cheese to get undeserved kills, and willo, to cripple any physical attacker or put smthn else on a timer. Tera steel is the obvious option here, and can enable rotom to live a hit and fire off a willow or trick as needed.
Dugtrio:
Earthquake spam is honestly fantastic right now, with a lot of mons being either weak to ground or frail enough to die anyway. Mons like swalot, ston, camel, and tink all get hit like a truck, and unless you have a ground immune, there are not a lot of relevant switchins at the moment. Stone edge is there to slap flying types, and is best used against a mon that will die to it if they dont switch out, preventing you from being hard punished for not clicking eq if they dont switch. Tera fire tera blast covers the grass matchup, with sucker punch to have a little priority. I chose adamant here because very few mons outspeed adamant but are slower than jolly, and the attack boost allows you to pick up some kills you would otherwise miss.
Noctowl:
Noct is the pirmary special attacker on the team, with a nasty plot set and tinted lens its very hard to switch in to if it picks up a kill. Its very good at taking out bulky mons, with tera blast being a solid attack before and after tera due to noctowls part normal typing. Air slash is good flying coverage without hurricanes 30% miss chance and heat wave cleans up steels that resist normal and flying, as well as ice types. Not a whole lot to say, just a solid pokemon all around
Falinks:
Finally, we got falinks, in contention for a quick ban and defiantly a very strong pokemon at the moment. This is a pretty standard NR set, but I swapped out the item to hard counter other falinks sets with tera ghost to be immune to CC and not be trapped by NR. I picked poison jab over iron head because I personally prefer a 30% poison chance to a 30% flinch chance.
Weaknesses:
This team has a little less immediate speed control than others, so scarfers and mons naturally faster than adamant duggy can be fairly troublesome. Thankfully identifying the enemy scarfer is usually straight forward, often being lycan, ndd, fan, or saws. Having that info can allow you to properly manage your tera and pick off the scarfer as needed, opening the game for a quick win after.
Replays w/ elo
Vs BlueBirdtheAltaria, 1254 - horribly miss-played the first turn but dragged it back
Vs Bubsy 64, 1498 - battle revolved around positioning of dugtrio, a clean double on turn 16 gave me the momentum I needed to secure the win
Vs Paratrooper69, 1280 - got an early setup opportunity with noctowl and a few kills, was hard for them to come back after that
Vs LTfarmington, 1320 - tricking the macargo gave me the momentum to get the battle rolling and secure a win with tera dark swalot
Vs Paratrooper69, 1310 - duggy cleans
Vs Fish Anemometer, 1500+ - caught him off guard with spdf rotom to kill scovillian, cost him the game.
Will probably add more replays
I also hit my highest elo ever using this team, passing 1300.
Last edited:
link
This team is built around CM Chimecho, but it has probably my favorite Swalot to run in the tier, a faster encore acid press set. Chimecho is the wincon it can actually be kind of annoying for teams to kill once it teras being a Steel type with levitate and good bulk is pretty valuable as well. Cacturne was added because I wanted a way to remove Tinkatuff / Swalot, Swalot specifically could tera dark and encore me or Tink can Para and encore. Stomping Tantrum works as a nice lure for both. Cacturne can die early game so I added Noctowl in order to pressure Tinkatuff more and cause its a strong breaker with NP Tera Ground. Gabite was added because I wanted more of a switch in into swalot and lycanroc and its just pretty easy to slap on teams. Dedenne was originally boots but I kept getting fucked up by rain so I made it scarf. You can opt for boots if you'd like. Then Swalot was slapped on because it covers a lot and its another good wincon.
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen9zu-1987128440-om3tiab3p16jcjyelqeqmdumskkaegcpw -heres a replay of chimecho being hard to kill for some teams.
Attachments
I made this team around the rather basic looking core of Missy + Swalot, as they synergize very well together. AcidPress Swalot is really fun in my opinion, and acts as a Knock Off absorber for Missy. Leafeon + Tinkatuff add to the defensive core and more Knock Off, which you can never have enough of. Rotom is busted as fuck. I just pretend Krokorok is still a good scarfer, and it is my premier way of speed control. Honestly, there is not much to say here, this just plays and feels like a very basic balance team.
week is over, time to vote!
Team 1: Band Dug + MHerb Falinks BO by Joethezombie
Team 2:
CM Chimecho + NP Owl BO by love chants
Team 3: WispHex Missy + Scarf Krok Balance by Corthius
Team 4: Dachs + Higgoo Fat Balance by Tuthur
Vote for your favourite team!
Deadline to vote is Sunday 12th at 10pm GMT+1.
Team 1:
Band Dug + MHerb Falinks BO by JoethezombieTeam 2:
CM Chimecho + NP Owl BO by love chantsTeam 3:
WispHex Missy + Scarf Krok Balance by CorthiusTeam 4:
Dachs + Higgoo Fat Balance by TuthurVote for your favourite team!
Deadline to vote is Sunday 12th at 10pm GMT+1.
Team 4(Persian go brrrr)
Team 1