How I Created My Team in Pokémon Violet
Hi, everyone!
A game that I finished recently and enjoyed a lot of is Pokémon Violet. I won’t say much for spoiler reasons, but it was a really good experience. Now that I’ve beaten the game’s main story, I want to put together a team of Pokémon. Obviously, I have the ones that I beat the game with, but I mostly just used whatever I happened to have and was useful in the moment. Now, I’m trying to make a dedicated and strong team of six that I can use all the time, especially in battles with other people. This is my way of documenting the process of team-building and sharing some insights on why I did what I did.
Warning: spoilers ahead.
I started by listing every Pokémon I would be willing to have on my team. I will only take brand-new, fully evolved Pokémon from Violet, specifically, since that’s the version I’m playing. Those would be:
Meowscarada
Skeledirge
Quaquaval
Oinkologne
Spidops
Lokix
Pawmot
Clodsire
Maushold
Daschbun
Arboliva
Squawkabilly
Garganacl
Annihilape
Ceruledge
Bellibolt
Kilowattrel
Dudunsparce
Farigiraf
Mabosstiff
Grafaiai
Paldean Tauros
Brambleghast
Toedscruel
Klawf
Scovillain
Rabsca
Espathra
Tinkaton
Wugtrio
Bombirdier
Palafin
Revavroom
Cyclizar
Orthworm
Glimmora
Houndstone
Flamigo
Cetitan
Kingambit
Veluza
Dondozo
Tatsugiri
Iron Treads
Iron Bundle
Iron Hands
Iron Jugulis
Iron Moth
Iron Thorns
Baxcalibur
Gholdengo
Iron Valiant
Meowscarada Skeledirge Quaquaval Oinkologne Spidops Lokix Pawmot Clodsire Maushold Daschbun Arboliva Squawkabilly Garganacl Annihilape Ceruledge Bellibolt Kilowattrel Dudunsparce Farigiraf Mabosstiff Grafaiai Paldean Tauros Brambleghast Toedscruel Klawf Scovillain Rabsca Espathra Tinkaton Wugtrio Bombirdier Palafin Revavroom Cyclizar Orthworm Glimmora Houndstone Flamigo Cetitan Kingambit Veluza Dondozo Tatsugiri Iron Treads Iron Bundle Iron Hands Iron Jugulis Iron Moth Iron Thorns Baxcalibur Gholdengo Iron Valiant
Well, that’s only…54 options…! I need to cut this field by a factor of nine to end up with a final six-member team. One more rule before we start: I will allow up to one of the seven future Paradox Pokémon on my team.
Attempt 1
To start off with, I ruled out every single-type Pokémon. I think that dual typings are generally better, because you have more STAB opportunities and more versatility in general. Just make sure not to open yourself up to more weaknesses, especially 4x ones. I also don’t want any of my Pokémon types to overlap.
Cutting single-types left me with fewer, but still a ton of my contenders and all seven future Pokémon. I started by adding and removing Pokémon from the team, making sure to avoid overlaps and major weaknesses, until I ended up with this layout:
You’ll notice that I haven’t yet specified any of their Tera Types. If possible, I would love for my team to be able to stand on its own merits before I beef it up even further with Tera stuff.
I think that this might be a good start. Of Pokémon’s 18 types, I have a Pokémon whose type counters 17 of them. The one I’m missing a good answer to is the Ghost type. Coincidentally, the team that I finally settled on in Pokémon Sword also had a ghost weakness, which was really annoying considering a friend of mine had a Dragapult as a main team member and consistently wrecked me. Should I be concerned about my Ghost weakness? Possibly. One of the most obviously overpowered Pokémon, at least as of writing, is Houndstone, the ghost dog Pokémon with the move Last Respects that gets more powerful as more of its team members faint. It has the capacity to destroy me if some hypothetical opponent wanted it to.
As I said, this is a good start, but I think I can do better than this. I certainly don’t hope that this first idea I came up with happens to be the best.
Attempt 2
If you can’t beat them, have them on your side, right? For this try, I want to make an exception to my dual-typing rule and let Houndstone on my team. We’ll see if I can make anything better out of this. The six I went for are:
I also added Palafin, another overpowered single-type Pokémon, because why not?
Now, of the 18 types, I’m able to cover 14 of them. I now miss out on coverage for Normal types — not a biggie, since the best Normal types are usually dual-typed — and Dragon, which presents the much bigger problem. I can solve this, but it’s going to mean I throw away the two overpowered team members here. I don’t mind doing so.
I need to find two Pokémon that are x/Ghost or Ghost/x and y/Water or Water/y, where x and y collectively cover Normal and Dragon. Either x or y has to be Fighting, for the Normal coverage, and the other one needs to be Dragon, Fairy, or Ice. Let me take a look at my big list of contenders again and I’ll get back to you.
That took way longer than it should have, but I was able to find a solution! As it turns out, x=Fighting and y=Dragon.
This here is a team I can be happy with. We cover all sixteen types, and, just checking…dang it! Toedscruel takes quad-damage from Ice types, Kingambit from Fighting, AND Iron Moth from Ground‽
Now, I’m not throwing this team out yet. This is the point at which I might pick Tera Types in order to cover up my weaknesses. Maybe like…
I didn’t think that would work as well as it did!
As it turns out, Toedscruel can’t know a single Fire-, Fighting-, or Rock-type move, but we can give it Tera Blast, the sort of one-size-fits-all Terastallized move, which is luckily able to handle Toedscruel’s shortcomings wonderfully.
Kingambit can learn Aerial Ace or Zen Headbutt, the latter of which is stronger, so I went with that.
Iron Moth can learn Solar Beam, which would do the job, but isn’t ideal. It can also learn Sunny Day, so maybe that’s a setup worth considering…?
Overall, even though I arguably redeemed this team a little, I think those quad-weaknesses really brought things down too much. Let’s move on just to see what else we might get. We can always come back if the need arises.
Attempt 3
This time, I decided to start off with my actual starter Pokémon and go from there. I ended up bringing on Scovillain, a repeat from Attempt 1, and Baxcalibur, a pseudo-legendary Pokémon. I would prefer not to use a pseudo-legendary, but I won’t stop it from happening if it’s the best option.
This team covers 16/18 types and misses out on Poison and Electric. If I could swap one of these Pokémon out for a rough equivalent who’s Ground type, I would. As a matter of fact, let’s see…
If we swap one repeat (Scovillain) for another (Toedscruel), we can add that much-appreciated Ground typing. What does that do to our coverage? Well, in the process of getting two coverages, we lost…nothing! This team has a counter to all 18 types. As for weaknesses, we did unfortunately inherit Toedscruel’s Ice-type weakness, but we’ve seen at least one way to handle it. We also pick up a new 4x Ground weakness with Iron Thorns, which can be addressed with an Ice Tera Type and the move Ice Punch.
I think the fact that this team naturally has great offense against all types warrants further investigation. We can start by assigning them two more things: a Tera Type and a move that makes good use of that Tera Type. It should be clear what threat I’m trying to mitigate using these Tera Types, but I’ll add a note too.
I dislike that this team is so reliant on Tera Blast, even though it’s a very solid-seeming move and all. It’s just that as opposed to other moves, it’s virtually useless when that Pokémon isn’t Terastallized. And you only get to Terastallize one Pokémon per battle, which makes me feel like at least three move slots are being put to waste here. Sidenote: why on Earth can’t Bombirdier learn Steel Wing?
And on a different note, only after I did all that work am I going to ask: should I be trying to limit my weaknesses using Tera Types? Or should I go all in on offensive damage? Is there much of a difference between those two strategies? I hope that these Pokémons’ three other moves will give them the power to actually defeat opponents, instead of avoiding as much damage as possible. So that’s what I’m going to do: I’ll make some possible movesets and add them in below.
Several hours later, here is the team that I was able to come up with. You’ll notice that I took the liberty of also specifying their abilities, natures, and held items.
For now, I think this the team that I want to try to create, test out, and run with for a while. It certainly took a lot of effort to get here! On some level, I am glad that I was able to incorporate my starter, even though I had bargained on it being mostly useless for real team building.
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed seeing my thought process, if you’re the type of person who likes Pokémon. I certainly hope this team works out — I may just have to make an addendum here down the road when I’ve figured out whether it does or not. And if you are a Pokémon player and there’s a conceivable chance we could battle in the future…
You didn’t see anything.
Image credit: “LEGO Poké Ball by MOC Nation” by BRICK 101 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0. I edited the image, namely by cropping and increasing/decreasing image values.
