Fighting is the bread and butter of any Pokémon trainer, and as such you’ll want to go into battle prepared to take on any foe. Use these quick tips to help you get ahead of the pack and dominate your friends and foes.

Curveballs¶

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Electric threats? They won’t like being hit with Earthquake…

Use attacks of a type to cover your Pokémon’s weakness, a Ground type with an Electric move for example, assuming it’s fast enough to get them out you can surprise opponents who thought they had you backed into a corner.

Get Annoying¶

While attacking again and again may work, you’ll find causing status ailments helpful in your battles.

Use Confuse Ray or Swagger to cause an opponent a chance to hurt themselves, utilise Double Team to increase your evasiveness and avoid enemy attacks, use Sweet Kiss on Pokémon of the opposite gender to cause yet more affects.

The joy of Confusion and Love is that they don’t occupy a Pokémon’s ailment status. Moves that cause Paralysis such as Thunder Wave can help your slow creatures gain an upper hand while attacks that cause issues such as Poison will slowly chip away at powerful opponents.

Nullify¶

A few types of Pokémon make for perfect, safe swaps for you to use at certain times.

Ground type Pokémon cannot be affected by Electricity attacks at all, for instance, and make a good call if an opponent releases an Electric type into combat.

Flying types will avoid Ground attacks with no help and while they can be weak against them in terms of attack, it’s a good way to waste your opponent’s move PP.

Sponge¶

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Blissey excels at taking special hits; physical hits will still hurt though.

Some Pokémon, such as Blissey and Wobbuffet, have huge amounts of HP meaning they can take huge amounts of damage before giving up the ghost. To add to this, Blissey can heal itself making it a perfect damage sponge with which to waste your opponent’s best attacks.

Another type of Sponge are creatures with huge defensive statistics, such as Snorlax and Starmie, and these creatures can often recover HP as well, making them perfect damage sponges.

Poison Trap¶

A good tactic to use against opponents who heal often is to affect them with poison and then ensnare the enemy with a contricting manoeuvre such as Wrap.

Team Construction¶

With these ideas in mind, use these pointers to construct your own team.

• Find Pokémon with a minimal amount of weaknesses according to their type.
• Devise a gameplan, there’s no point having one Pokémon concentrated on Poison, another on offensive moves, another on damage absorption etc. without any overall aim. Having a global plan that can be applied to all Pokémon will help your overall construction.
• With that in mind, do build a team with the intention of swapping creatures around. It’s worth having a Pokémon that can take a lot of damage and heal it back so you can use it to soak up attacks from a particularly strong opponent, while it’s also crucial to have a fast creature for fast attacks and to cause status ailments.
• Have a variety of types to counter a variety of types. Look at what moves you have and think whether or not you have any glaring holes in your strength.
• Ensure that you have a creature to deal with Dragon types, they are strong and you’ll need them for sure.