

In the event of a Speed-tie, where two Pokemon have identical Speed stats, there is a 50% chance that your Pokemon will move first. If a Pokemon is KO’d during the turn, attack priority will skip over their position in the list on to the next Pokemon. Once sorted, the Pokemon will attack round-robin from first to last. At the start of a turn, once all players have selected their moves, all four Pokemon will be sorted by their speed stat highest to lowest. Speed is the one area we’ll dive a little deeper into here, because it’s an important one to understand right off the bat. This is one of the most important factors in competitive Pokemon, as going second may very well end up in a knockout by your opponent.


Pokemon with a high Attack stat will excel at using Physical moves, while Pokemon with high Special Attack will excel at using Special moves. Each of these stats determine how effective a Pokemon is in that area. When looking at this stat view above, we are presented with six numerical values (HP/Atk/Def/SpA/SpD/Spe). Lucky for us, the most recent Generations have done a great job at teasing the behind-the-scenes work, allowing us to estimate things without relying on pen and paper. Though these stats are being displayed to you just as past games do (a simple number for each of the Pokemon’s six stats), there’s a lot going on behind the scenes that you may not be familiar with. When you select a Pokemon in your party, you’re presented with a clean and easy to read summary sheet. Get ready to learn some Pokemon math, and how it applies to the competitive game! Stats? Like the Ones On My Screen? While we may want to dive right into selecting members for our team, there are a few topics worth discussing before doing so. Sun teams have been a tried-and-true win condition over years of Pokemon, so where better to begin. Of teams currently seeing play, Sun is going to be the main focus of the Pokemon 101 Team Building discussion.

Last time, in Planning My Team, we discussed the VGC 2018 (VGC18) format, and began looking at the various archetypal pillars.
