The C-Team: Specialists Elite

[Kinoko_Otoko]

The C-Team
Specialists Elite

Greetings. I have designed a crack team of elite specialists with a single purpose in mind: The subduing and capture of legendary Pokemon without the use of Master Balls. If such an endeavor lacks appeal to you, you may wish to seek enlightenment elsewhere. The team is as follows:

Atropos the

VENOMOTH
@Leftovers
Ability: Shield Dust (alt. Tinted Lens)
•Sleep Powder
•Substitute
•Defog
•Baton Pass

Nene the

SCIZOR
@Focus Band
Ability: Swarm (alt. Technician)
•False Swipe
•Swords Dance
•Iron Defense
•Baton Pass

Bromos the

UMBREON
@Leftovers
Ability: Synchronize
•Yawn
•Mean Look
•Double Team
•Baton Pass

Flid the

GIRAFARIG
@Brightpowder
Ability: Inner Focus (alt. Early Bird)
•Amnesia
•Foresight
•Agility
•Baton Pass


As you can see, each one has Baton Pass. The reason for this should be obvious: As long as you don't forget to BP, you can max out Attack, Defense, Sp. Defense, Speed and Evade, hide behind a Substitute, identify Ghost types with Foresight, trap wandering targets with Mean Look, lower the target's Evasion so that Sleep Powder never misses and, of course, False Swipe the target to 1 HP. All without losing any of those buffs and debuffs. The extra two spaces in your team can be used for HM slaves or additional support; right now for instance I'm about to use this team along with a Banette's Trick on an HG Snorlax, to get rid of his Leftovers.

Of course, even with fully buffed defenses there's always a chance that not only will a target's attack hit, it will critically hit, which in the case of many of the likely targets means a super effective critical OHKO against our bug/steel/poison/psychic/normal team here. But with Substitute, even a super effective crit won't OHKO us. You'd have to suffer 2 crits in a row to even have a chance of the target OHKOing you once you're buffed out. And with no way for us to even accidentally cause non-False Swipe damage to the target (no Poison Point or Effect Spore, etc.) the only possible way to knock out the target is for your Pokeballs to miss long enough for the target to run out of PP for every move and start struggling, which will almost never happen as long as you're careful to keep it slept. There's a slight chance of Umbreon's Synchronize causing problems, but it's pretty slim.

The only real weakness this setup has is that Venomoth is likely to require some PP restoring items for Sleep Powder if the fight drags on too long due to virtually every legendary having Pressure. But with most 3rd gen and later versions having Leppa Berries, you have a renewable source of PP restoring items so even that's not a real problem.

Notice that this particular setup is optimized for 4th Gen. The only difference between this and 3rd gen is that in 3rd gen Umbreon can't learn Yawn and Venomoth can't learn Defog. But there are so many other moves that would be useful that you can't complain too much. I haven't done much research on it, but I believe that many of the same moves can even be taught in 2nd gen. It's important to note that many of these moves are egg moves, especially Baton Pass; I spent a good deal of effort breeding this team. Despite this, you might have noticed that I have Swarm on my Scizor instead of Technician; this is because I bred and trained her on 3rd gen. Technician is obviously the better choice, as it gives an incredible benefit for this purpose, and Swarm does nothing.

Specifics are of course up to the user, in particular with items. As I recall I mostly just used what I had handy, although Leftovers is highly recommended for Venomoth due to usage of Substitute. Also, I just realized as I was preparing this article that Foresight should have the same effect as using Defog 6 times; if anyone can confirm this for me I would be very appreciative. Although I should note that Defog has other uses, such as removing defensive or offensive battle effects such as Safeguard, Reflect and Toxic Spikes.

EVs are pretty much by preference, with the exception that Scizor is the only one who benefits from any attack EVs at all, and Sp. Attack EVs don't do any of them any good. Speed EVs are probably unnecessary, since I'm pretty sure using Agility 2 or 3 times makes you faster than anything in the game. That really depends on how badly you want to avoid needing to use Agility. Natures are another one that's really a preference thing; I didn't pay too much attention to mine. Pretty much the same rules that apply to EVs apply to natures.

One important thing to note is that my particular team is locked at level 69. This is because in Diamond and Pearl you are forced to fight Dialga/Palkia before you earn the final Gym badge, meaning if they're any higher than that they won't listen to you. This is not a problem, however, as I'm not aware of any legendaries that you have to fight at a level higher than 70. This team at 69 versus a level 70 legendary makes for an interesting fight, and the legendary will pretty much always end up in a Pokeball of some sort. If I remember correctly, I've caught every non-event legendary in D/P with this team at least once, despite type disadvantages (Heatran really didn't like Atropos much... and vice versa).

And a final important note is that there are a handful of legendaries in particular which I can't recommend this team for. Mewtwo in FRLG requires a special strategy, as he has both Safeguard and Recover (and Defog isn't available in 3rd gen). So far I've been using a Gardevoir with Imprison, Safeguard, Hypnosis and Thunderbolt at level 72, and she works OK but it's not a perfect solution. If Imprison works with Baton Pass that would open up new possibilities, but for now this team doesn't work well with him. The second is Rayquaza in RSE. Rayquaza is a mean sob; he has Outrage, which confuses him, and Rest, which completely heals him. I recommend not trying to catch him without a Master Ball period. The last bunch is the legendary dogs/hamsters/whatever in FRLG; as I understand it, using Mean Look will cause them to run away and permanently disappear. Since there is no way to trap them, I recommend the Master Ball here as well... if you even want to catch them. Due to either a bug or an incredibly infuriating design choice, the legendary dogs in FRLG will always have terrible IVs, so catching them isn't terribly worth it anyway.

I'm fairly satisfied with my team, so I'm mostly posting it here for the benefit of others who might want to try using it. However, I'm not under the illusion that it's perfect (I only figured out about the Foresight/Defog redundancy, and Scizor's Technician, while typing this up!) so if you have any suggestions feel free to speak up.

Special thanks to Veekun and his amazing searchable database for help with the research that went into designing this team.
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