I stopped playing competitive Pokemon for a while because I have some networking issues on my switch. It always takes multiple tries to find an opponent, presumably because I have no ipv4 address. But when I realized that there was an interesting tournament this weekend I couldn’t resist participating regardless.

In the Armor Beginnings Cup, only Pokemon from the newly released “Isle of Armor” DLC where allowed. When I took a look at the list of eligible Pokemon I immediately recognized that stall would be very effective. So my initial idea was to build a stally team that would still be very effective against opposing stall.

As I had no time to play the DLC or build a new team from scratch I just used Pokemon transferred over from generation 7. This limited my options tremendously and I ended up building a much more offensive team instead:

Team Overview

I choose Toxapex and Porygon2 as the defensive backbone of the team. Porygon2 also had Trick Room to allow for a Azumarill or Alolan-Marowak sweep. I added a choice scarfed Alakazam with Trick as a stall countermeasure and lastly a Krookodile as a Stealth Rock setter.

Usage rates

Usage rates from most selected to least selected:

1. Azumarill was the star of the show and the Pokemon I selected most often. Lead Urshifu was incredibly common and I liked to counter lead with Azumarill in this case to force it out and set up with Bellydrum. It was EVed to outspeed Porygon2 which came in clutch.
2. Porgyon2 was a great partner as trick room setter and defensive wall. Trace was not that useful unfortunately. All the Gyarados I encountered were Moxie instead of Intimidate
3. Alolan-Marowak was very useful as a Magnezone counter and as a second trick room option.
4. Scarf Simsala was quite good but I still had a hard time against full stall and lost most matches against it.
5. Toxapex was not brought very often. I thought that the composition of Porgyon2+Toxapex+Trick Room sweeper would make for a great semi stall mode, but most teams were quite well prepared for stall and were able to demolish this combo. I think this balanced approach was not well suited for this competition and you really had to go all in with stall or hyper offensive.
6. Krookodile was not very useful, partly because there were that many Urshifu. There would have been much better Stealth Rock setters like the often used Lycanroc.

Results

Compared to the tournaments in generation 7, it was much harder to win. Most teams I encountered were well built. I also made many mistakes, so it took me 43 games to reach my goal of getting a rating of 1600:

I enjoyed playing in the tournament quite a bit and will try to make a version of the team that can be used on the regular Battle Stadium Singles ladder.