PsySpam - SD Gliscor Bluff
This is a team I built earlier this year for
ckw to use in BWPL - some of the EVs might be a bit off because I had to recreate it after nuking my builder but this is fundamentally the same squad as you can see in
this replay. The game plan didn't play out exactly as we anticipated here, but we came away with the W anyway.
The idea behind the team is to bluff being a pretty average PsySpam team at preview with something like Scarf or SD Garchomp, but in reality to be a team hard based around SD Gliscor with the dual Psychics playing more of a supportive role. Once SD Gliscor gets going it can be incredibly difficult to stop, and this team is geared around supporting it as well as possible. Hidden Power [Fire] Latios, MixChomp, and Focus Blast Alakazam serve as triple lures for Skarmory, possibly Gliscor's #1 enemy, with MixChomp also helping to cripple Landorus-T, Slowbro etc. Dual Psychic inherently baits in Tyranitar to Pursuit, leading to SD Gliscor set-up chances. Meanwhile, Lum Ferrothorn is a strong anti-lead into Rotom-W and in a solitary turn can prevent it from acting as a mid/late-game Gliscor answer. Teams lacking hard defensive counters to Gliscor will instead rely on fast, half-answers like their own Latios, Alakazam, or Keldeo which can at least revenge kill a +2 Gliscor - as a result, this team aims to bait and cripple these checks utilising a triple Thunder Wave core of Tyranitar, Ferrothorn, and Alakazam.
When building, I really liked the 6 that I had settled on but one Pokemon stands out as a huge pain - Mamoswine. Our opponent had pretty low Mamoswine usage so if there was ever a week to risk it, this was the week, but I still felt the need to go back into the builder and find some "outs" vs the pig. As much as I love Psyshock Alakazam, Psychic is important here just for damage vs Mamoswine. Next, Gliscor runs a turbo EV spread here hitting 260 speed, which not only gives a more favourable match-up against opposing Gliscor and Modest Heatran but importantly puts you a point faster than Mamoswine - this can come in clutch as priority NMI Ice Shard cannot OHKO Gliscor from full. Ferrothorn runs a physically defensive EV spread, somewhat of a relic of the past but a set that i think is hugely underrated not only for greater consistency into Mamoswine, but also for its ability to bait and paralyse early game Keldeo (Specs Secret Sword: 73.2 - 86.9%) to help Gliscor. Finally, Latios runs a little bit of defense investment on this team but my mindset is the following: Latios has such high base SAtk and such low Def that moving across 80 EVs barely affects your power (~4% decrease) whilst giving a pretty significant bulk boost (takes physical hits ~11% better). That alone is enough to skew important calcs and can create situations where your opp thinks they can remove Latios with Ice Shard, only to barely miss on the KO. This also comes in pretty useful against things like Breloom which are otherwise pretty horrible to switch into.
Team isn't perfect by any means, but the idea of SD Gliscor + 5 lures is really really fun. If anyone wants to test this out, would recommend maybe also trying more attack investment maybe even Adamant on Gliscor, which absolutely bodies defensive waters at just +2 - never really got around to testing this myself but the idea seems solid!