#but not yet...

first off... pidgeot!

the pokemon i built this team around and maybe the most straightforward set of them all... timid and max speed lets mega pidgeot outspeed mega salamence by a single point and ultimately is just a really fast pokemon that hits really hard. no guard, pidgeot's ability after mega evolving, is a really nice ability to have in the battle tree where so many pokemon are running bright powder/lax incense or straight up have evasion boosting moves. i picked hidden power ice just to hit 4x weak targets a little harder, like a lot of the dragons, though most of the time hurricane is the move being clicked (and instantly killing things...)

the pidgey line isn't native to alola but i used the friend safari in X to catch one and transferred it up. not hard to access at all assuming you have some way to transfer pokemon considering how common pidgey is in this franchise, but it was nice to have it in the friend safari because i was able to start with pidgeys with a couple of perfect IVs in the breeding process. that being said, i just sort of hatched random pidgeys until i got hidden power ice and then hyper trained the thing, so the one perfect special attack IV that passed down didn't end up mattering all that much.

next up... pidgeot's lead partner, infernape!

this infernape probably looks pretty weird. i wanted two main things when looking for a lead partner for pidgeot: fake out, and the ability to nuke opposing rock types that threaten pidgeot in one shot pretty consistently (which also required a usable relatively high speed stat). originally i was planning to use mienshao for this, but mienshao doesn't have close combat, only low kick... which was pretty good into a lot of big heavy rock types, don't get me wrong, but considerably less good into a lot of ice types which pidgeot is also weak to and the fighting type also covers, and the fightinium Z move is less powerful off of low kick, too. with 244 speed EVs, infernape is still fast enough to achieve the speech benchmark i wanted, and it gets a lot more damage with close combat. i put the tiniest bit of investment into special defense so that it would be higher than defense, to prevent the porygon line from getting a special attack boost with download off of it.

you may be wondering why the heck this thing has thunder punch instead of flare blitz or something. the answer is that otherwise this team, as you'll see, is pretty weak into water, especially because a lot of water types have ice coverage that hit pidgeot pretty hard. this is not exactly how pokemon damage math works, but to give an about correct estimation: iron fist boosts thunder punch's base power from 75 to 90. on super effective targets, this doubles to 180. close combat, just on account of being fighting STAB, is also boosted from 120 to 180. the important part is thunder punch doesn't have any defense dropping drawback like close combat does, and some water types resist fighting so thunder punch is more useful in those cases, especially after the fighting Z move is used up (190 base power off of close combat x 1.5 STAB boost = ~285 base power by the way)

protect is infernape's last move because protect is generally good in doubles and as you'll see in a bit, one of my team members has earthquake.

for some reason, until ability patches were introduced on the switch games, the only way to legitimately get chimchar with its hidden ability was through a japanese exclusive entralink event during pokemon black and white. that's it. and until gen 6, you couldn't even breed more, as hidden abilities used to only pass down from females and the event chimchar was always male. it was possible to fully legitimately get HA chimchar in gens 6-7 by trading for a breedject, but wi-fi services are gone and pretendo network isn't updated for pokemon for the common layperson yet... so to get started with breeding my infernape, i set up entralinked, a gamesync server emulator and connected to it with our japanese white and sent myself a chimchar. this is pretty much as close as i could get to legitimate at this point in time

then i just transferred the chimchar up and bred it until it had 5 perfect IVs and HA... which was actually a nightmare and by far took the longest out of all the pokemon i had to breed and train for this, but it was worth it. i got an SOS chain setup going with trevenant (chained in the dexnav in kiki's alpha sapphire, thanks kiki) and mew as my synchronize/false swipe lead, got some 4 IV dittos from SOS chains, and bred the chimchar from there. those SOS chains are where this funny picture from the other day came from:

anyway...

third, krookodile!

as we've been over, pidgeot is weak to rock and ice attacks, which infernape is great into. but pidgeot is also very much weak to electric attacks. and that's where krookodile comes in - pidgeot can bait electric attacks from the opponent and then swap into krookodile which is immune. krookodile gets immediate value too because of its intimidate ability. the "bulk" provided by intimidate plus the assault vest means that even if krookodile swaps in on an electric attack and some other type of attack, it is very unlikely to faint or even take substantial damage on the switch. then it can use its wide coverage for a lot of damage. earthquake is nice because pidgeot and the next team member i'll cover are both immune, and knock off combines large damage with utility, superpower is just nice fighting coverage especially if infernape has gone down, and dragon tail is the least clicked move but it can get rid of a pokemon that has set up in a pinch. i try not to run any low accuracy moves in the tree because introducing more RNG variance is bound to make me lose on a long streak, but there was nothing better than dragon tail, and it's a last resort move anyway.

its EV spread is also straightforward - 180 speed was a benchmark for... something, i'm going to be honest i genuinely don't remember what anymore, but after that i maxed out attack and dumped the rest of the EVs into bulk. obtaining krookodile was also really straightforward, as its line is natively available in alola, though i did end up catching a couple in kiki's friend safari again because the immediate perfect IVs were nice.

last up for the main team, celesteela!

after finishing up the three main pokemon of the team i was a little stuck on my last member. pidgeot's weaknesses were mostly accounted for, so i just needed something to round everything off... i realized that the team didn't hit that hard into fairies despite krookodile's fairy weakness, and also that thunder punch on infernape was not enough to handle water types. i wanted something that was immune to earthquake too. initially i figured a levitate user would probably be best to not double up on flying weaknesses, and i picked bronzong for its fairy killing capabilities, but it was still really weak into water types and was a little too passive. i ended up taking another look at flying types and realized that celesteela was perfect - its steel typing cancelled out the repeat flying weaknesses other than electric moves which were more than handled by krookodile and also allowed for fairy killing, and it had grass coverage for water types!!

the EV spread on this thing looks crazy and that's because i hyper-optimized it for some reason. 212 attack EVs + adamant nature ensures 1HKOs on as many fairy types as possible with heavy slam (252 attack EVs would not ensure any more KOs. yes i checked every single fairy type set in the battle tree). 156 HP EVs brings celesteela to an HP stat of 192, which is divisible by 16, which maximizes recovery from leftovers. the defensive stats are otherwise made equal, except i've once again optimized for porygon line download by making special defense a bit higher than defense. the leftover 4 speed EVs ensure outspeeding a tyranitar set by one point.

thankfully my main game of choice is unsurprisingly ultra moon because celesteela is a version exclusive. i'm playing through ultra sun but i've still only just hit akala island and it would be a long time until i had access to any of the ultra sun exclusive ultra beasts. but it was as easy as doing ultra warp rides for a while until i found the ultra crater. i do still have to hyper train it though, and the picture above is actually before i hyper train it... i've just been doing runs without the hyper training thus far lol q-q

now as i mentioned, this whole team was made because i need ribbons out of the battle tree. this means that on the final battle against blue, i want to have a slot - ideally two - open in the back for pokemon that might contribute nothing to the battle so they can get carried to the ribbon. the issue is unlike previous battle facilities, blue does not have a set team of four, he has a wide pool of possible pokemon sets that are randomly selected each time he's battled.

(screenshot courtesy of bulbapedia)

not only does he have this massive pool of pokemon, but he also has the possibility of mega alakazam or mega aerodactyl, two of the fastest pokemon in the entire game. finding two pokemon that could beat any combination of all of these was going to be really tough.

i don't have as much to say about this part because frankly i built these two while very sleepy and don't remember as much of my thought process, but...

(mega) mawile and (ash) greninja!

i tested out a lot of pokemon before this but ended up landing on these two for pretty straightforward reasons. i needed a pokemon with a strong sucker punch and combined with base mawile's access to intimidate, mega mawile with huge power ended up fitting the bill. iron head does high damage into a lot of things and KOs others, brick break KOs mega tyranitar 100% of the time, and thunder punch KOs non-mega gyarados. mega mawile is slow though, and i needed a strong, fast attacker to back it up. since mawile has sucker punch, it didn't need to be the absolute fastest thing in the game, though. my choice ended up being the event exclusive battle bond "ash greninja" for its insane damage output, high speed, and wide coverage that matches up pretty much perfectly into blue's whole possible team.

choice specs and absolute maximum speed is necessary on greninja because otherwise untransformed base greninja can't consistently outspeed blue's mega pidgeot and 1HKO it. it literally outspeeds mega pidgeot by a single point with timid nature and 252 speed EVs, and the KO with choice specs ice beam is just barely 100% consistent at 244 special attack EVs (i bumped it up to 252 because no reason not to), so it almost feels like greninja was custom built for this purpose. this is really important because one of his possible mega pidgeots has the ability to set up tailwind, which could ruin mawile's careful speed benchmarking. thankfully even though i want to beat blue with two pokemon, even if the two ribbon masters in the back are effectively useless, they can be used as sacrifices to reset the choice lock on greninja (or get two intimidates off with mawile before it megas)

getting mawile was hilariously easy because i already have a mega mawile for the battle royal ribbon and i just bred down that one, but ash greninja... well, it's an event pokemon exclusive to the sun and moon demo. i don't know why i didn't take pictures of me doing this but i booted up the demo (thankfully kiki downloaded it to our 3ds before wi-fi shutdown for this exact reason) and played through it and transferred the ash greninja to her pokemon moon copy that she had played last year. i soft reset for a timid nature and then brought it over to ultra moon. such a weird pokemon... but that's a ramble for another time.

anyway, that's the team, and i don't know if i'd recommend it because of how much effort it takes to build, but i'm having a lot of fun with it and i wanted to document how much thought went into it. it was really rewarding to design my own team instead of just using one other people have had success with. i don't know why i wanted to use mega pidgeot so bad, but the bird just possessed me, i guess... lol

i've been having so much success with this team that i've gotten a 50 streak and beaten blue multiple times already! the previous time i didn't even have calculators open or look up sets and i still got through just fine, so suffice to say the team feels good to use and is pretty consistent. its main issue, despite thunder punch and seed bomb, is still water types - rotom and all its forms in particular are a "high alert" pokemon that i have to prioritize KOing before all else because levitate means i can't hit it with krookodile's earthquake and it threatens so much of my team. but overall it's more than manageable.