Since the Mix and Mega Fall Seasonal is now finished, I thought that i would drop some of the teams I've been using over that time period (not sample submissions). A lot of these are out of fashion in the meta now since these builds were made over the span of 4 months, so i'll use that as an excuse to talk about the meta changes that stopped me from continuing to use the older ones.
This was a team that i built just as the seasonal was starting, based around a fast manectite latias. The ev spread here gives it 398 speed, enough to outspeed adamant kartana but more importantly lucarionite terrakion which hits 394. The special attack evs allow it to reliably OHKO lucarionite terrakion with psychic, and then the rest is thrown into defense to maximize physical bulk with the remaining evs. Unlike most answers to lucarionite terrakion, it can't be broken by a correct taunt play whilst it roosts, making it one of the best answers you could have at the time. This is a cool perk, however it isn't really the reason that it turned out to be so effective on this team. In this case, access to powerful stabs and good speed turned out to be very helpful in deterring certain mons from switching in, and it fits well with the rest of this team's ability to sponge attacks and retaliate with stronger ones. Another big reason to use latias is its access to healing wish, allowing it to bring back weakened mons on the team whilst getting off an intimidate and clearing a free turn for the next mon to come in safely to receive its hp. These perks both proved to be very valuable niches for the metagame at the time, disrupting a lot of offensive cores by giving mons that would normally be overwhelmed by the sheer power of these cores a second chance, whilst also not giving wallbreakers such as darkrai the free switches they were used to in a metagame full of manectite mews.
The two natural additions to any team featuring healing wish are defensive pdon and sablenite magearna. These two mons are capable of switching into a large portion of the mnm metagame due to their great bulk, solid typings and powerful moves that can often OHKO their targets. Healing wish accounts for their lack of reliable recovery, allowing them to switch into top metagame threats more than usual, often providing enough extra switchins so that the common cores designed to break them would instead lose. Next up was defog pinsirite kartana, which provided me a solid offensive threat which could also work against altarianite landorus-t and toxic spikes. Golisopod provides a second hazard, priority and a general ground check, which was very useful in taking on some of the threats that the team is weaker to defensively. At this point, the team felt quite weak to alt zyg and mandibuzz, so i decided to add a second rocker in altarianite landorus-therian, which could also provide an extra emergency check to terrak if latias wanted to healing wish something else lategame.
Unfortunately, this team is slightly outdated now, due to rises in usage of alt zyg, kartana and lunala it's much harder to play without solid checks to these three, and at any point that the first two can potentially win, golisopod becomes set up bait, which is risky. They can all be held off by hazards and some combination of mons (normally mage and pdon), but with so many teams featuring zyg and kart it's only a matter of time before you run into them paired with the right core and lack the resources to stop them. The team may also sometimes struggle to break newer balances due to altarianite lando-t and pinsirite kartana being more well-known nowadays, and it lacks a great way to pressure ho-oh if it comes in before rocks go up. Despite these flaws, I still felt that this team deserved a longer description, since it was one of the teams i could trust more going into tough matches, and nearly every time that i lost with it was the result of a significant misplay on my part, rather than any matchup issue with the team.
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen7mixandmega-809894053 This replay is a fun showcase of accurate aggressive play by geerat whilst using this team, also taking advantage of the available healing wish in the back as an opportunity for pdon to 1v1 lando-t even if it decided to click earthquake.
So this was an idea that came up when i was talking with andy and chazm about how to innovate webs for the current meta. Pinsirite zeraora helps webs deal with noivern and at least stop pins mage from sweeping. When i first heard the idea, i wasn't at all convinced, due to the utility of pins mage on webs builds and the fact that zeraora has a weaker initial damage output than most other mons used on webs. I wanted the team to separate itself from most other webs by being playable as a rocks HO more often, since shuckle is just as good a rocks setter as it is a webs setter, so i decided to include darkrai+kartana, as well as alt zyg to help out with speed control. Pdon is just pdon, entei check that also breaks really well and has a high base power, 100 percent accurate move to close out games with webs up.
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen7mixandmega-819454531 funbot vs highlord
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen7mixandmega-817426609 me vs mark
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen7mixandmega-827634518 me vs geerat
Overall, I'd still be happy to use this team but I would probably directly switch rai for either lucarionite or diancite tapu lele so that the team loses less momentum against atespeed. Lucarionite is able to live one hit from the threatening flying mons and appreciates the webs speed drop more, but diancite can outspeed kart outside of webs and prevent noivern from getting off a defog from any amount of hp. Luckily even with this change the cores still operate in roughly the same manner as tapu lele uses non-aggronite buzzwole as bait and it still draws magearna in to get chipped heavily, which helps kart zera and zyg win more easily later in the game. I would probably also change the kartana to jolly, to solidify the noivern matchup a bit more.
These are two variants of a backbone i've been using for fat balance teams (I'm not posting full teams because i've never quite finished it perfectly and i've tried a few different filler slots). The first one was an edit to the second suggested by qt, and is the one that i prefer right now. These mons cover a lot of the meta's top breakers and top rockers, but it notably struggles against mixed sd don, terrakion (especially the guessing game involved in the second variant) and webs, due to shuckle's ability to set rocks on these builds, as well as some more fringe mons such as pinsirite kartana for the second build and lucarionite tapu lele for both. Honestly i'm not convinced by this style at all with the diversity of the current meta, but there was a point a couple months ago where these builds could take on anything that was actually in use, so i've decided to mention them but for now these are outdated unfortunately.
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen7mixandmega-827626916 This was the most recent version that i tried, although kartana was just a last minute filler addition. Gliscor was an attempt to kill two birds with one stone, by fixing my mixed sd don matchup whilst being able to defog rocks away on the very common eruption pdon found on webs. A more serious last slot would be some sort of terrak switchin, and whilst i did bring cm split on the mage in this game, a heart swap mage may be more appropriate to handle calm mind lele.
Balance built around tini to help with pogre. Mandibuzz is a generally bulky slow pivot that can also keep rocks off against defensive don, one of the few commonly used tini switchins. Mandibuzz is supported by defog kartana which helps to keep rocks off against altarianite landorus-therian, whilst also occasionally being able to clean/break given the right situation. Tyranitar here supports mandibuzz against cores involving moonblast lunala, notably kart+lun is hard to deal with for this team otherwise. It also provides a check to fires apart from pdon and entei as well as a resist for noivern and all three variants of darkrai (typically they don't run focus blast due to a general lack of targets in the meta compared to thunder), whilst also having access to SR. Arceus-ground here runs two attacks+wisp, a set that i'm a fan of for its ability to check a large portion of the physical meta whilst not baiting in too many wallbreakers (ho-oh is the most notable one that groundceus does let in freely). Groundceus also provides an immunity to mage's volt switch, since the team lacks pdon to block it. Altarianite zygarde fills the last slot to help out with terrakion, generally give speed control and also to help clean and limit the opponent's plays by forcing them to deal with another offensive threat.
I can't say i've ever felt truly comfortable with this team but it has won enough for me to talk about it at least. Tapu lele and ho-oh matchups look particularly weak here, since any ho-oh team that's able to stop ttar from getting rocks up will wall most of the team for a while, but also kartana can easily become a problem if mandibuzz is overloaded, which will happen with a few cores popping up now as kart usage increases. The team also gets pressured by toxic entei, because arceus-ground is a key part of the team and can't really afford to be poisoned against a lot of builds.
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen7mixandmega-833490118 Mandibuzz gets frozen early but the team pulls through, the groundceus and zygarde were particularly helpful for wearing the opposing team down until zyg could clean.
In general for most of the rounds I was bringing geerat webs in between those other teams, iirc it won 7/7 of the games i used it in ssnl and is definitely the most dominant webs build in the meta right now. Alas it's not mine, so i won't be sharing the pokepaste here.
Here's a few other fun teams that I used or wanted to use:
https://pokepast.es/bb0104b3740c11ca such a shame this never got used competitively lol, was actually kinda looking forward to the day it would be useful, ho-oh one-time blocks mandibuzz's u-turn so that terrak/lele can get a free switchin and start wrecking stuff.
https://pokepast.es/d2e794d547d39d72 very old webs team with sets slightly changed, picked this against mihawk since it was a webs build that could break down ditto stall with the dual primal core
https://pokepast.es/33157650d473fd13 fun with alt mew, I keep switching between tailwind and taunt in the last slot
https://pokepast.es/1ba65be6848fb4d1 Brought this against chazm twice
https://pokepast.es/74d473bb450eff1c Also brought this against chazm twice
https://pokepast.es/ce67979de59e8cbc Claiming recoverless fairyceus, this team is still kinda bad tho
https://pokepast.es/5b4dd8c19294bc91 Very old team as can be seen from the mew, but i brought this once early on and passed it to geerat for r2