Machao's Post of the Year 2025

[Machao754]

Let me start by saying I hope to continue doing this next year. That is, if I continue playing next year. This year of PRO has been a lot of fun at times, and not a lot of fun at other times. I try too hard sometimes to try to prove each team is "worthy," and at times, this feels a bit forceful and time consuming, leading to many games to be played that shouldn't have been played. But, regardless, it has been fun talking to my fellow friends/teambuilders/partners in crime in chat and discussing with them the pros and cons of each team and how to improve it. I think with the new additions (boots, new pokemons), it's time to move on from these teams.

I know a lot of people on ladder like to "copy" my teams already, and I know there are a lot of bootleg teams out there. Most of them probably got the teams pretty close to correct. But hey, nothing beats the real thing right. I am posting them because I don't mind people using them to play, but I am really really hoping that I can reach a couple of you teambuilders and inspire new ideas. Please keep in mind these teams might not feel very effective in pvp because they are relics of the past. I will try to link every team with a season, but my memory is very hazy and I skipped some months, so I will probably not be getting all of them correct.
 
January PVP Season
 
Pokepaste:
1) 
☆☆ https://pokepast.es/a710f104e2140d35
2) 
☆☆☆☆ https://pokepast.es/c872e403fa475a68
This is the season after my return to PRO. Technically, I returned in December, but I don't even remember what I used. This season, I set out to build the best team I could possibly build and try to see if I can take first. The first team I tried was 1). I remember halfway through the season (not sure why) I decided to switch to my new team.  Probably due to the hippowdon team being a bit too slow for my liking.  
I think team 2) serves as the foundation of all my future teambuilds. I didn't realize it at that time, but about the only team I will play is BO. And central to BO is essentially a good defensive core, a good scarfer, and offensive pokemons that usually have good defensive utilities. The goal isn't to win as fast as possible, but it is also not to stack up on as many defensive pokemons as possible. So pokemons with good defensive abilities are important. You'll see this come up time and time again. A scarfer is important because it patches up the issue that most BOs have, which is being too slow.  In addition, almost all scarfers have some sort of ability to use trick or switcheroo, which is very important to shut down any setup sweepers and help with the consistency of the team.
I am not exactly sure if this is the case, but I think January was the first season Slowking with chilly reception was released. And this pokemon, imo, was meta-changing. It completely hardstops one of the pokemons that was terrorizing the metagame, keldeo. It is a defensive pokemon, but it gained the ability to tank a hit, regen, and switch. Momentum is a very necessary thing in maintaining pressure in bulky offense. In addition, the ability to future sight, is vital to forcing progress. Something like skarmory will struggle against a future sight in the air in addition to a +2 knock or HJK.  
I also remember wanting to build with blacephalon due to some outbreaks. With these two pokemons set, the rest is pretty self-explanatory. Tangrowth completes the perfect synergy FWG core and deals with physical attackers. Tangrowth might seem like a weird pick given its lack of usage in PRO, but it functions very solidly here. I am not sure if Skarmory gets body-press back then, but even if it does, Tangrowth still helps with things like Dragonite and Bisharp by threatening Sleep Powder. In addition, it is a progress maker with knock—off, and deals with the ever-annoying ferrothorn through HP-fire as opposed to Skarmory, who gets leech-seeded and might be placed into a rough spot. Landorus rounds up the team with rocks defog (which might seem a little stupid), and lures in Zapdos with Z-rock, which helps with lopunny and bisharp. In addition, it aids tangrowth to ensure it doesn’t get overloaded. 
Lopunny is the fast attacker that threatens faster pokemons with fake-out spam and bisharp is a slower setup sweeper that has amazing defensive utility against most things. An eviolite bisharp is crucial as both means of offense and defense, as it makes it kind of like a mini kingambit that was incredibly hard to switch into, even for Zapdos. Against anything not called skarmory or garchomp, worse comes to worse, Bisharp can stay in and kill in a 1-for-1 trade. Lastly, blacephalon is the scarfer that can just shadow spam to snowball out of control, and punish opponents without either a scarfer or a normal/dark type.
Recurring themes that I struggled to build against are BD azu (very common in PRO), keldeo, kommo-o, mega-diancie, kyurem, bisharp, and volcarona.  For this team, having slowking on the team implicitly checks the latter 4, whereas BD azu feels fine with bisharp, helmet tangrowth, and lopunny with fake outs. Volcarona is probably mostly fine with two priority users and landorus, and is likely as much of an insurance as you are going to get (gosh I hate this pokemon). Bisharp is also super annoying to build against, but tangrowth mostly deals with it just fine, and at worse is a 1-1 trade.  Lopunny and my own bisharp help significantly. Overall, one of the most solid teams I have built.

February PVP Season

Pokepaste:

☆☆ https://pokepast.es/083ddc9d0ce282e9 
Contrary to the teamname, Heracross is not the goat. This was the season where fatter teams were picking up in usage, so I thought Heracross could be a cool pokemon to use. Give Heracross some bulk, and it would be incredibly hard to break its substitute.  Most landorus will struggle to break its substitute because doing so likely means hitting stone edge, which heracross would likely get up sword dances during the process. With teleport and the success of slowking, I thought it would be cool to use a defensive core where two pokemons can simultaneously tank a hit and run away to gain a more favorable matchup, but that was not as effective as I thought. Slowking is as effective as ever, but telling clefable to do this seems to be wishful thinking. Clefable itself is not a bulky pokemon, and its use means you are constantly forced to Wish. In addition, even if you wish, you are forced into a dilemma between healing your teammate or keeping yourself healthy.  If we go down the machao’s nemesis checklist, “BD azu (very common in PRO), keldeo, kommo-o, mega-diancie, kyurem, bisharp, and volcarona,” you’ll see we are probably even more solid against them some of the pokemons compared to last season. However, bisharp is a huge problem for our team because of iron-head flinches, against heracross, life orb sucker punch against garchomp once it sets up. Volcarona is also hard to deal with and relies on rocks being up to beat it. In addition, one thing I struggled with this season was serperior, which can tear through my team with leaf storms. Aegislash also wasn’t as solid of a clefable answer as I thought… it struggled to break through it with flash cannon. Since it was my last and only line of defense against clefable, I had to switch it to iron head, and even then it was not great… I didn’t like this team as much because it felt matchup-y in the sense that, yes it is good into most things, but common stuff like bisharp, serperior, and clefable were very annoying to deal with, and to me that is a big failure as a teambuilder.
 
March PVP Season

Pokepaste:

☆☆☆☆☆ https://pokepast.es/429ae1d640b6a359
This is the best team I’ve built. Probably so far and in the future. It is creative, innovative, and just cool. Sash explosion landorus is standard for these types of teams.  But we have a scarfer in keldeo, which can win on its own, a speed-boosting blacephalon, which can win on its own, bisharp and mawile offensive core, which can win on its own, and as extra insurance, Cresselia, who can heal any one of them and get us a second chance if anything messes up. In addition, we have the option to set trick room in an emergency situation, healing and getting either Mawile or bisharp in to do big damage.
I remember one of the biggest problems for this team was keldeo. It clicks scald and wins. A common trick I had to do was explode landorus on keldeo for a 1 for 1 exchange. Rotom-wash was also very annoying to deal with as landorus was my primary volt-blocker and none of the other pokemons appreciated a will-o-wisp. 
The objective of this team is to win as fast as possible, using one of the 4 means after getting rocks up. If one doesn’t work, try another one until it works. It is surprisingly easy for blacephalon to set up and run away with the game because most people assume it is choice-scarf. With a Z as a nuke, you can easily get +1 speed, which opponents will struggle to deal with.  Calm-mind, along with hp invest, gives it decent bulk to work with most of the time.
If you take a look at the team, it is stacked with attackers. So how do we guarantee we have a way of dealing with almost everything? This role is placed on the movesets and evs of our pokemons. As opposed to the standard sets, bisharp was tailored for outspeeding adamant azumarill and living an aqua jet at +6. Kommo-o was beaten through setting trick room, mega-diancie through trick room or scarf keldeo, or any of the steel types trading one for one then being lunar-danced back. Kyurem was 1v1 through cresselia moonblast, Bisharp was beaten through keldeo, substitute blacephalon, or brick break hyper cutter mawile to not give it an attack boost upon switching in. Volcarona is beaten by scarf keldeo with stone edge. With all these backup plans in case things go wrong and the ability to exert so much offensive pressure, this is truly one of the best teams I’ve ever built.
One thing that I did struggle against but didn’t face was some sort of mega-latias + muk + skarmory stall. If muk somehow takes out blacephalon, it will be extremely difficult to break through skarmory. Just those two might be fine due to keldeo, but the addition of mega-latias makes it near impossible to play against. Special thanks to idkup for pointing it out, but I am glad that I didn’t face this combination.
 
May PVP Season

Pokepaste:

☆☆☆ https://pokepast.es/2ed139bd47dbcec9
This was the season alomomola starts showing up, and I severely underestimated how good it was. This was also the season where slowking comes back, and my goated ursaluna set came to fruition. The reason why I used beedrill was not because of a dare, or a challenge. I just remember building the rest of the team and wanting a fast pokemon to round the team out. And somehow, it just worked.
I think the team worked because of how fat the meta is. Beedrill is not very hard hitting, but being able to put down a toxic spikes early in the game plays dividends in the long run. With how many molas and skarmory and landorus (as usual) running around, placing down a toxic spikes breaks down these molas core easily. Due to beedrill’s super low hp, endeavor is a nuke after it takes 2 rounds of rocks against defensive teams.
Now, a bit about rest-talk luna: it also was kind of a surprise. I was just at first thinking if façade works under sleep, which I don’t believe it does. However, I still tried rest-talk to see if that is the case to not only give it longevity, but also power when asleep. I realize that one of the most common struggles with ursaluna is it just hitting into rocky helmets and chipping itself to death with flame orb. Hence, we want to give ursaluna longevity by giving it maximum hp and the ability to heal up against fat and passive teams.
This ursaluna set is imo the best set on PRO right now. Against offense, the way to use it is to trade it 1 for 1 for their most annoying pokemon. Ursaluna’s bulk enables it to do that. Against stall, ursaluna becomes a damage dealing machine, hitting pokemons with conjunction with future sight until they break.
Honestly, that’s mostly all I want to talk about for this team. The rest of the team, unfortunately, is not that great. They are more so members necessary to round up the team. Skarmory feels pretty broken at that time because no one knows what it does. I remember hoopa were starting to show up around this time, so bisharp really helps with it. It is a fun team and I am glad I got 1st with it, but I don’t know if I will queue with it again.
 
August PVP Season

Pokepaste:

☆ https://pokepast.es/ba3191dc6b971595
I hate this team and I don’t want to talk about it. In short, I tried to build something that would stop alomomola, felt like gastrodon was a good pick, went with it, and it ended up being very mid because it couldn’t set hazards. I struggled a bit this season quite frankly, and I was traveling so I couldn’t really think much about PRO. If you see any machao teams that ended up with weird stuff like occa berry ferrothorn, you know something ended up very wrong.
** Brief Aside
This was also the season I felt diancie-m was pretty broken (one of the best megas in game at least). It is faster than everything, has a stab that is hard to resist outside of ferrothorn and pretty much nothing else. This made me think I had to build a team with Diancie, and diancie itself ended up pretty good, but was not necessarily the easiest to pilot with mola eating up every attack. Sub keldeo was also due to mola, but mola and latios would just do these flip turns into and out of keldeo to break its sub, which I felt was very very oppressive.
This season was just awful to play against because 1) everyone just uses alomomola flip and 2) everyone has some sort of build with scarf latios + hoopa unbound for wall breaking other alomomola. When there is a universal best team / best core such as this, I think the enabler, aka alomomola, has to be dealt with. And I am very glad that ended up being the case.
 
September PVP Season

Pokepaste:

☆☆☆ https://pokepast.es/81708401d167b44d
I don’t know why this is the team most people on gold server probably know me by (judging by the amount of people who copy it), but I am not happy with that. If you want a good team, go copy the best team I’ve ever built. Not some altaria bs.
Ok, I have a love-hate relationship with this team. If you are an astute reader, you will probably realize that this team is exactly the same as the beedrill team except it has altaria over it. This was not initially intended. It seems like I just end up using the same pokemons because of how solid they are.
Altaria is a cool pokemon I wanted to build with. I felt like the modest set is most solid, because its typing checks so many things that are problematic under my list such as kommo-o and bd-azu. In fact, its speed is specifically ev-d to outspeed bd azu. I recall the special defense is for beating mega-charizard-y and volcarona reliably. I considered fire blast or flamethrower over toxic, and while it is useful at times, being able to spread status around as a midground is also very useful.
The rest of the team pretty much functions the same as before. I felt like beedrill wouldn’t be as useful this season due to the lack of alomomolas. On paper, this is the most solid team I’ve ever built. However, this team is extremely prone to hax. I have gotten my skarmory crit so many times when all it needs to do is let off a game winning body press.  
**Brief Aside 
I remember I once almost crashed out because this team has the freest matchup against poppachav (Team: Victini, Registeel, beedrill, mandibuzz… forgot the last two). Pretty much, I got hard counters versus victini in slowking, and other than that, the rest of his team loses against skarmory. Well, to beat him, I would need to get into an iron defense war versus registeel. First game against Poppachav, I lost the iron defense war due to a critical hit. Then, since he was in range of tornadus heatwave, I went to tornadus and missed the heatwave as he rested.  After that, I had no way of killing his registeel… Second game, I had to get into an iron defense war again and got a critical hit again… That made me so pissed and I almost quit playing Pokemon.
This is why I hated this team. Even when the odds were completely in my favor, bullsh*t like this keeps happening and I would lose rating. It was already incredibly hard to gain rating when you are 400 points above everyone else you are playing, so losing in this manner was just incredibly frustrating.
Another version of this team featured terrakion. Fearing that bisharp was too slow and still wanting a fighting resist, terrakion is a solid replacement.  Unfortunately, terrakion is a pretty inconsistent pokemon. Sure it is speedier, but it doesn’t outrun the crucial 110 base speed, speed tier to deal with metagross, something bisharp handles much better.  In addition, running terrakion means handing it the z-move and switching tornadus-t to some life orb variant, which didn’t end up working too well.
That is why I think this is a turning point. I swear to never run a team so slow ever again. If I need to get into a setup war against my opponent to win, then fine, I will do it.  But I don’t want this to be consistently my only out against my opponent’s teams.  In the future teams, you will see that I modified my style of bulky offense a bit such that it is not so slow and treading towards balance anymore. There is a more well-defined defensive core and the guaranteed presence of a scarfer (favorite scarfer incoming…).
 
October PVP Season

Pokepaste:
1) 
      ☆☆☆ https://pokepast.es/00f17600af703bab
2) 
      ☆☆☆☆ https://pokepast.es/03b70461352dd163
October is the ash-gren month, and the month where sneasler and clodsire were added.  I ended up using two different teams, both of which feature a mawile ash-gren core. I honestly don’t have much to say regarding this month other than the fact that ash-gren is pretty broken. It is speedy and extremely difficult to switch into. The fact that it can run spikes or drop it for u-turn or ice-beam to hit pokemons that would otherwise resist it for big damage is just insanely powerful. 
I think the teambuilding philosophy for these types of season is simple: put an ash-gren on your team, pair it with a powerful mega (mawile or lopunny seems to be good), and add an ash gren resist in ferrothorn, tangrowth, or amoonguss. I guess because this month added clodsire, clodsire works too, and is probably one of the best pokemons to pick against ash-gren. Regardless, once you have these components on your team, you can finally start thinking about the rest of the team.
I honestly don’t really remember too much about what happened when building just because this month was a mess. I switched my team because I ended up really wanting to use sneasler, and sneasler honestly fits perfectly with the second team, providing tons of offensive pressure in close combat that threatens poison, uturn that threatens poison, and a scarf trick that shuts down defensive cores. This core does not necessitate a choice specs greninja as one thing I found was that mawile and sneasler likely completes this job already. Hence a waterium-z set was chosen for ease of setting spikes and the ability to switch moves. 
Sneasler is what I believe is the best scarfer in the game right now. It outspeeds adamant drill under sand, all other scarfers, and is pretty much the fastest option that still does very significant damage with close combat. The fact that it can easily lure in landorus-t and threaten a poison is also incredible. The only thing that I dislike about it compared to other scarfers is its bulk has something left to be desired, but it is just fast, hard-hitting, and consistent. This team deserves a 4-star because of sneasler.  Shoutout to my fellow sneasler appreciators out there <3.
I remember this was the month where clodsire stall picked up, with some clodsire, mega latias, clef, skarmory, annhilape, alomomola (?) type of team, which was run by the vn guild basculin. And at that time, I felt like that was a very very good team. It seemed to consistently beat a lot of the offensive cores centered around ash-gren with clodsire and alomomola completely nullifying it. I am happy to see stall pick up slightly (not that I want to use it, but for the balancing of the metagame), because of how utterly bad it was for the past couple of months. However, the main reason why I brought this up is because I was told by some vn guild member (who is on the ladder btw) to sit after losing against this team, and then I beat him 3 times in a row after… So maybe don’t talk so much [heck] in the future.
 
November PVP Season

Pokepaste:

☆☆☆☆ https://pokepast.es/363bd8e7a677a86d
This is the last season I will be covering, and the only season I did on silver. I moved to silver to test to see how well I will do in silver. And honestly, I did fairly well but also suffered a lot.
I really like this team. I think bold volcarona is very good and potentially an oppressive existence. The fact that this mon can act as both an offensive and defensive behemoth… this ability is second to none. In addition, there are pretty much no priorities that can kill it in one. The strongest one I can think of, banded crawdaunt aqua jet, only does around 85% to this volcarona spread.
I think this team combines a lot of the conclusions I reached over the past few months.  Need a fat, hard-hitting ground type that destroys fat, check. Need something for keldeo and latios, check. Need a near unswitchable existence and a fairy type? Get diancie on the team (In reality this mon struggled a bit due to the addition of clodsire, so I had to reassess my take a bit. However, clodsire is a free switch in for ursaluna). How to make the team more broken? Put a volcarona on the team.
I will say that mandibuzz is a bit of a special pick. Why not zapdos or skarmory?  In terms of pure physical bulk, I feel like mandibuzz was the bulkiest pokemon I’ve run.  The ability to do significant damage with foul play is very desirable. However, that doesn’t explain why choose it over the pivoting ability zapdos provides or the spikes skarmory gives. Part of the reason is because 1) Mandibuzz is especially good against breloom, blocking it with its overcoat ability. 2) Psychic types such as mega-alakazam can be extremely problematic to the team otherwise. 3) I want to have extra insurance in toxic vs. volcaronas I could face. Mandibuzz does not seem like that good of a pick, but against a neutral hit, for example, ursaluna, mandibuzz takes the hit much better than zapdos. It also has the added benefit of completing walling hoopa-unbound.
Iron defense is also completely mandatory. Yes, there is no body press, but Iron defense turns games against setup pokemons like swampert or even mawile on its head, beating them by taking advantage of their attack boosts. It is also a very good late game win-con against ho teams that stack on physical attackers such as dragonite, bisharp, and breloom.
On silver, I faced many clodsire and skarmory cores. It was kind of a struggle, because clodsire would wall diancie, and ursaluna would be walled by skarm. To break this loop, some sort of future-sight play is necessary, but in the process, slowking could get toxic’d, and hazards could go up. It is pretty annoying to play against and honestly a failure on my part to predict this meta-trend. However, I think with good play, this was completely manageable.
The biggest problem for this team is bd azumarill. Holy [heck] this was bad. Once it belly drums up, how do I deal with it? 200 speed mandibuzz foul play. Yeah, there is literally no counter play otherwise. It’s not like my other pokemons kill it in 1 hit (except ursaluna) so this was usually the only way. It requires a lot of skillful playing and managing to beat it.
I have to get into why I hate silver server now. Let me just say I like how it is more competitive than gold and its queue time is lower. I am not one to shy away from competition. But, I hate counter-teaming, I think it is the lowest of the low. Someone told me to queue on silver, you need 3 teams, because certain people who intentionally look at your rating change, and snipe you with their counter team. And to be honest, they are right. I’ve been sniped again and again, until I thought it was time to stop queueing or avoid certain people because of how dedicated they are to sniping. 
Let me give you an example. After beating this said person, I was sniped by specs protean greninja (which is bad enough), in addition to adamant azumarill, and rock slide metagross. Obviously, I lost once, but I was able to overcome that deficit after knowing what to look out for in the following game. Then the person changed to jolly azumarill.  Yep, instant loss.
As another example, I was sniped by triple scarf + some crawdaunt, which my team does not deal with. Triple scarf is just unscientific, particularly after I beat the opponent once already.
In addition to all that, my hatred to silver was probably exacerbated by the fact that I was juggling school projects, trying to get first place on the silver ladder, and getting immensely sick for 2 weeks of November. I was so close to getting 600 on the ladder (I think I reached 590), until some guy who lose to volcarona paralyzed it with scarf glare serperior like 4 turns in a row so I can’t get 1 singular roost off and I had to see it die to a nidoking at +3 spA and spD boosts. I was so incredibly frustrated that I probably threw a couple games. And after that the sickness hit and the sniping hit and the rest is history.
I think I am still pretty proud of how this team did. I expected it to be competitive, and most players are competitive in a good way, but it was just a select few who are sullying the rest. I think the main difference between gold and silver is simply skill level, and significantly less hyper offense to deal with. Silver teams trend on the bulky side, with a decent number of stall, but I was able to dispatch those successfully. There was also more rain.
This is why I am avoiding silver in the future, and you likely won’t see me there anymore. I can accept losing to people legitimately, and people making adjustments on how they play, but changing teams just to beat one person is just wrong… I think in a tournament setting, I can accept that because scouting is part of a 1v1 gameplay.  But a ladder (this is only possible in pro because the ladder is not active), is not meant for you to target one singular player, so you shouldn’t just swap your team out for 10 minutes and replace it with something else after 20. 
 
This pretty much sums up everything for this year. I will not be publishing my December team just yet since the season has not ended… that will likely have to wait until next year. I would like to thank a couple people for the support to lead to success I had this year. Specifically, Jorogumo, who helped with the teambuilding process, banklas and cyan, who lent me a lot of pokemons which I otherwise would take years to garner, and mcnutt and scrub, who sacrificed their win rate to help me test my teams to see if they could be successful. I can’t express the amount of gratitude especially to Joro for listening to me in my dms and going down checklists with me to see how the team can be improved. And I can’t express the amount of fun (and sorrow) sometimes I had with banklas, Joro, and scrub when we talk about pvp together. 
We are just right around 5000 words, and this was much longer than I intended it to be.  However, if you reached this point, I hope you had a good read, please take my teams and use them as you like, and hope to see you in 2026.

Edited 4 hours ago by Machao754

[Jorogumo]

Very proud to call you a friend, Machao. I've had a lot of fun teambuilding with you this year. You've always pushed yourself to try new cores and strategies to revolutionize Bulky Offense in PRO.

 

Congrats on all your achievements in 2025, and here's to another successful year! 

[Sergioaguero]

goat

 

Edited 3 hours ago by Sergioaguero

[Norex]

Really great post 

Big GG for 2025 and GLHF for 2026, no quitting allowed.

[Ykhtsu]

I came back playing mons approximately in May and got some chances to play against you, you're clearly a great player and the effort you put in teambuilding is very respectable.

 

Also it would be cool see you and more players joining non-official tournaments like the Lacomus one, since nowadays PRO feels just like try to reach Top1 and sit there till the seasons end.

 

Congrats for all your achievements, keep it up and happy new year!!