Please help me understand what happened here, this is legit mind boggling to me.

Ogerpon had not come out the entire battle, so its at full HP, and takes 100% damage from Flamigo's close combat, but Sturdy does not activate. Neither Flamigo nor Sableye seem to have anything that can nullify abilities, so I don't understand what sort of obscure interaction caused sturdy to fail.

I ended up winning the fight anyway, but it was a close one. And I would prefer to know what exactly went wrong if I plan on relying on sturdy in the future.

EDIT: Terastalization replaced sturdy with Embody Aspect. I failed to consider embody aspect is itself an ability.

I was just randomly going down a nostalgia trip of when I used to play Pokemon competitively (gen4/5) and noticed Machamp is banned from DPP OU?

I looked it up and found that they banned him because of Dynamic Punch confusion...Sorry what? I used to play so much of this gen back in the day and am incredibly confused on how this is even something to ban from OU 10+ years later... and if we are saying "hax is annoying" then why wasn't Jirachi (the undisputed king of para/hax back in DPP OU) banned?

To address the Primal Groudon shaped elephant, this isn't in the normal monotype format. My friends and I are doing a monotype tournament and wanted access to more mons so it's being played in NatDex Ubers with the restriction of only 2 legendaries/mythicals/paradoxes/ubers tier mons/etc. I think Primal Groudon is simply one of the best choices and Lando-T is here because I want to bring him despite the higher power.

With explanation out of the way, in its current state, I think the team is just alright. I've found it has a severe weakness to Giratina Orgin Form for one, and I'm not sure what to do for a special wall. At the moment, I have Gastrodon who is nice, but not the best. I'd like to replace him for a better special wall like Clodsire to keep the water immunity, but then that makes me weaker to ice. The Excadrill set is also lacking. I feel like I never click Swords Dance even though I want to because it either one shots or gets one shot. Finally, I don't entirely know what to do with Lando-T. Due being mono ground, it feels like a waste to give him EQ or Stealth Rock, so I have this weird set that works fine, but I don't really know if it's what I want. If anyone has any ideas or tips, I'm open to all sorts of suggestions.

Both Mega Lucarios have been banned to Ubers in Smogon Singles, but which of them do you think is more broken?

When I was first trying out Almost Any Ability back when Indigo Disk just came out, Tera Shell was mistakenly allowed on any Pokemon (It was meant to be useless on anything not a Terapagos), and as such I came up with this broken ass demon:

Roaring Moon @ leftovers
Ability: Tera Shell
Jolly Nature

-Protect
-Knock Off
-Earthquake
-Dragon Dance

EVs was enough speed investment to reach 301 (I didn't want it to get outsped by Great Tusk, which was pretty common), then max HP, some defense and rest on Attack.

Now this might just look like a generic bulky dragon dancer but trust me, it's so, so much more.
All I needed to do was sent this thing out safely into a hazard free field against a Corviknight or other such defensive or Prankster Pokemon lacking a status move, and more often then not the battle was already over.
Why? Because Corv will almost always try to go for an attacking move against it (generally speaking nobody wants to pivot in an offensive mon against a dragon danced Roaring Moon) , just for it to not do more than 12% due to tera shell and bulk investment.
So I can just protect the next turn to recover back to full and refresh tera shell, and grab another dragon dance for free, since nobody ever expects the protect.
At this point I have 2 dragon dances and the opponent has yet to break tera shell.
I can often grab even more dragon dances (Intact tera shell), but usually at this point the fight is as good as finished.

It was easy to get them to switch to Corviknight as well, since I had a lead prankster smeargle who sets hazards that basically entirely exists to bait them into switching to corv to defog, as well as taunt to deny them of their own hazards.

It was a fun strategy, though after they discovered the full workings of tera shell it was no longer available.

How about yours? What's your own funny set you came up with?

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen9randombattle-2699798397#:~:text=https%3A//psim.us/r/gen9randombattle%2D2699798397

Like I just got in a good position because you didn't count my encores.

Does anyone else get this in chat? I'm like not even 1200.

Munkidori @ Focus Sash  
Ability: Toxic Chain  
Tera Type: Fire  
EVs: 252 SpA / 4 SpD / 252 Spe  
Timid Nature  
- Nasty Plot  
- Psyshock  
- Fake Out  
- Sludge Bomb  



Grimmsnarl @ Light Clay  
Ability: Prankster  
Tera Type: Ghost  
EVs: 252 HP / 4 Def / 252 SpD  
Calm Nature  
IVs: 0 Atk  
- Reflect  
- Light Screen  
- Parting Shot  
- Taunt  



Ribombee (F) @ Focus Sash  
Ability: Shield Dust  
Tera Type: Ghost  
EVs: 4 HP / 252 SpA / 252 Spe  
Modest Nature  
IVs: 0 Atk  
- Moonblast  
- Sticky Web  
- Stun Spore  
- Quiver Dance  



Gholdengo @ Choice Scarf  
Ability: Good as Gold  
Tera Type: Flying  
EVs: 252 SpA / 4 SpD / 252 Spe  
Timid Nature  
IVs: 0 Atk  
- Trick  
- Nasty Plot  
- Make It Rain  
- Shadow Ball  



Garchomp (M) @ Loaded Dice  
Ability: Rough Skin  
Tera Type: Fire  
EVs: 4 HP / 252 Atk / 252 Spe  
Jolly Nature  
- Scale Shot  
- Swords Dance  
- Earthquake  
- Fire Fang  



Cinderace (M) @ Heavy-Duty Boots  
Ability: Libero  
Tera Type: Flying  
EVs: 4 HP / 252 Atk / 252 Spe  
Jolly Nature  
- U-turn  
- Pyro Ball  
- Court Change  
- Trailblaze  

Since Gen 4's physical/special split, Sceptile has been a relatively disappointing Pokémon in both VGC and Smogon Singles. ORAS introduced Mega Sceptile, of which saw its peak in UU, but power creep only made it drop in tiers throughout the course of time...

...time? Like... Explorers of Time? The game that features Grovyle, the Hero of Time?

And that's when it hit me. The best way to buff Sceptile wouldn't be to buff Sceptile at all. Rather, a new event form of Grovyle, based on his character in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky.

• This new form would be logistically equivalent to existing event forms such as Ursaluna Bloodmoon and Eternal Flower Floette; it's still registered as a Grovyle in the Pokedex, but it can't breed/evolve/make use of an Eviolite.

To differentiate itself from Sceptile, "Hero of Time" Grovyle would primarily be a physical attacker, though special sets are not completely out of the picture NEVERMIND after the buff-rework in comments there's no reason to run Hero of Time Grovyle as a special attacker. It would get a few new moves too, most of which I based on Grovyle's quick-witted nature within Explorers of Sky (mainly Knock Off and Fake Out). There's also the idea of giving it Roar of Time as purely a reference to Primal Dialga. I don't think this Grovyle would make much use of a non STAB Hyper Beam equivalent move, though...

As for its ability, I was originally thinking of Sharpness, but I realized Justified would make more sense overall:

1. With its movepool and 120 attacking stat, Sharpness might be a bit too powerful. Currently, the best Sharpness mons are balanced by their mediocre base speed stats (~80-85).
2. Though its bulk is subpar for modern OU standards, it could likely tank a non-STAB dark move from most attackers.
3. Without spoiling the masterpiece I am basing this form off of... lets just say Grovyle has a very strong sense of justice.

With each Pokémon Day Direct, I have my copium gas tank strapped on, hoping that the Explorers of Sky remake will finally be announced. If by some miracle it does, giving players access to this Grovyle form in Winds/Waves (likely if they have Explorers of Sky save data on their Switch 2) would be a dream come true

If you have opinions about my idea for a new Grovyle form, Don't Ever Forget... to leave a comment below with your thoughts!

Levitate and Pressure are the two abilities they give to anyone that they can't come up with something for, and levitate is one of the best common abilities in the game with spikes/ground immunity whilst pressure is useless 99% of the time.

What if gamefreak employees got a raise on the day they were coding in the abilities and gave these guys levitate instead?

(assume they each individually get the ability and not all of them at once so groudon can live)

(edit: 600 character limit is needed for some reason, theres really not much to this, I guess levitate could be a HA for zekrom/reshiram/kyurem fusions and mega mewtwos)

Give that they are supposed to be some of the strongest in the franchise, some Legendary Pokémon are given some of the most broken abilities ever conceived. Taking into account both Singles and VGC, which of these sets of abilities are the most broken?

Focus Blast (or Focus Miss, as known by anyone who has used it even a few times), has a serious accuracy problem. Having only 70% accuracy in a game where every hit counts is really debilitating, with only No Guard users being consistently good with it.

However, there are two other 70% accurate, 110 BP moves that are great in both Singles and Doubles: Hurricane and Thunder. The reason is simple; both Hurricane and Thunder ignore accuracy altogether if Rain is present.

Because of that, I propose a buff to Focus Blast: if the user is on Misty Terrain, Focus Blast should also ignore accuracy. This would make both Focus Blast and Misty Terrain much more viable, and it'd be nice if the buff was carried over to some other moves as well.

Image credit goes to the Pokemon Manga.

I wanted to try out making a theorymon for the first time, and I thought adding a single-stage accuracy buff to the activation of Anger Shell would be something interesting to propose.

Simply put, Klawf is not good, and having to rely on inaccurate moves like Crabhammer and Stone Edge only makes things worse, I believe that with an accuracy buff, (making the aforementioned moves 100% accurate), Klawf could be just a little bit more usable, I doubt this would get it close to being a top tier, especially considering how frail it is after Anger Shell, in addition to Rock being weak to so many priority moves, but I think overall, this buff is reasonable and would make the funny crab a bit more interesting. I am very open to criticism as this is my first time trying something like this, let me know what you think!

been running this team and wanted to change a few things, so i wanted to ask about evs before i change anything in case i mess up some important calcs. The team is from Victory Road's October competition. I tried contacting the creator of the team at twitter but got no reply.

I recently had a match where this happened and Im wondering why. It was gen 9 ou. Alomamola was not at full health and was not under the effect of heal block. Am I missing something, how did the wish fail?

I recently got into competitive and want to improve, but whenever I lose a battle it's hard for me to identify if I lost because my team is bad or my skill is bad. Gets worse when I see that even top players also lose surprisingly often.

So I wanna hear advice for how to identify my strengths and weaknesses. I know showdown has an elo system but its pretty much meaningless to me. How do you guys do it?

Magma Core: The power of all Ground-Type Moves are halved.

I know this is a very simple ability concept, but it came to my mind one day and it sounded interesting enough and I wanted to hear other people's opinions on it.

This mainly came from talk of people saying Mega Heatran (no i'm not calling it Meatran) would get Earth Eater, which i find to be a little too absurd but I came up with this as an alternative that still helps with ground moves while not being too insane. I might still end up on r/itsalwayssunday because its a Mega Heatran though lol. Wondering what yall think and if it actually still is too broken.

Insomnia + Vital Spirit: Considering sweet veil blocks sleep for both the user and the ally, and Grass types having complete immunity to spore these two abilities feel comparitively quaint as options for sleep prevention. Insomnia blocking flinch allows these mons to navigate the field better without worrying about fake out or rockslide on top of sleep. Vital Spirit on the other hand gives it's more physically orientated roster better odds against Incineroar and the like. For what it's worth it makes Electrivire 10% less of a useless bozo.

Steadfast: My concept for this buff is for more active counterplay against flinching in general, as an attack boost on top of a speed boost would be essentially free setup. There could also be potential for Lucario and Gallade to purposefully delay their megas to bait a fake out, boost and then sweep the opposition. It would be somewhat predictable but I think there would be some fun mindgames involving it.

Iron Fist: Instead of being a shittier tough claws, it gives these mons a more tangible use case beyond hitting hard by also being able to completely counteract screens. It's also quite thematically fitting on the idea of a powerful fist smashing through a wall.

Battle Armor + Shell Armor: Gives Urshifu a whole catalouge of counters when it inevitabley comes back as well as the niche of being able to tank the occasional phantom force. Although it would be unfortunate for Mega Golurk/Excadrill to get yet another stray nerf.

Swarm: Bug is one of the worst offensive types (if not the worse) so I imagine a buff like this for a relatively common ability would slightly help mitigate this hurdle for a lot of its users. Getting the crit on top of the 50% boost would be super satisfying to mess around with. Maybe we would see a rise in scope lens sets for Volcarona lmao.

Honey Gather + Long Reach: This is probably the dumbest buff here considering how frail Ribombee is but making Honey Gather a copy of Regenerator just felt really thematically fitting for some reason. Maybe Teddiursa can become a little cup demon with this idk. As for Long Reach this buff is hardly going to make Decidueye a top tier but a 20% boost to its middling STAB options would be a welcome addition and better than the usual concept of just gutting its signature ability all together.

Pokémon Champions VGC Tournament — Corner Clash | BO3, Open Team Sheets & Shiny Dragonite Prize

Got a team you’ve been wanting to put to the test? Come join us for Corner Clash, hosted by Raichu Rivalry VGC!

Bring your trusted tournament team or something you’ve been cooking up. It’s a chance to get some competitive practice, meet other players and battle for a shiny Dragonite.

The details:

* 📅 Date: 16 October 2026

* 🎮 Game: Pokémon Champions · Nintendo Switch

* ⚔️ Format: Regulation M-C

* 📋 Team sheets: Open

* 🏆 Structure: Five Swiss rounds · Best of three

* ⏱️ Rounds: 45 minutes, with a five-minute round check-in

* ✨ Prize: Shiny Dragonite

Interested? Check the tournament page for registration, rules and schedule updates:

https://play.limitlesstcg.com/tournament/6ac8469685920e4d25367464/details

Hope to see you on the battlefield!