hello everybody generation 9 is extremely difficult to build in and often times you won't be able to fit everything you want onto a team a few months ago I made a video called 10 things every competitive Pokemon team needs in this video I go over the list of things that most teams really want to have including the following items one resistances to all types two immunities to ground and electric three hazards and Hazard control four priority and fast Pokemon and five at least one knockoff user while all of these things are important to consider when team building with smart building you can lack some of these and still have a great team even adding desirable things like a knockoff user to a team comes with an opportunity cost it sometimes means you won't be able to add something else you might need even more gen n building is brutal and sacrifices of things you once consider Ed essential is often necessary in building but you need to be careful about how and when you do it today I'm going to tell you guys about when it's okay to skimp on these so-called requirements and how to do it also while I'll explain I'll be playing a background footage of the games for my recent live streams I stream every Saturday at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on YouTube let's start with resistances to all types your team absolutely Ely should resist almost all types uh and if absolutely all types if you can afford it still there are two types that it wouldn't be a disaster if you didn't have a resistor immunity for in the right context the first one is ice only weile and curum are the ice types in OU and there are ways other than solid resists to answer these two having a few Pokémon that can defensively tear a steel with the addition of incredible special walls like blissy or assault vest gallerian sling can be sufficient to handle kierum if you have a very offensive team or a hyper offense team you can also usually get by without an ice resist since kurum is quite slow and relatively easy for ho and offense teams to deal with that being said that makes weile a greater concern especially since it has ice Shard you want to make sure you can still handle Weil somehow ideally both offensively and defensively with something like iron Valiant and gouging fire respectively if you have to lack an ice resist make sure you can handle these two Pokemon similarly with the Ghost type only Gango and dragapult in OU have ghost stab coverage and similar to the ice types you only really need to cover Gango and dragapult rather than ghosts in general strong special walls like claw's iron Heatran can sometimes be sufficient to handle these two similarly to ice if your team is offensive enough and has a lot of Pokemon that threaten dragapult and Gango things like primarina Sucker Punch Cinder rase scarers that KO dragapult booster Speed Energy Pokemon and similar things you can get past without a ghost resist you may have noticed by now that I've twice in a row brought up how having a more offensive team makes it more okay to lack a resist this is a generally consistent rule offensive teams have an easy e your time dropping team requirements in general with Hyper offense shattering most of the building rules that are essential to balance in general the more offensive a team is the less consistent and capable its quote team requirements need to be this is for two main reasons first because the more offensive a team is generally games go faster this means that even if an answer to a certain threat is a relatively poor answer it likely only needs to be able to perform this task once or twice for example consider a threat like Heatran a stall team will probably need a core of glcore all mola and Blissey to consistently answer Heatran and since stall teams are quite passive Heatran will have plenty of opportunities to enter the field this means that the stall team is going to have to have a very reliable and repeatable series of answers for Heatran if you're running a hyper offense team though perhaps a roaring Moon without Roost is a sufficient Heatran switch in Heatran is relatively slow and not bulky enough to withstand setup sweepers for long so roaring Moon works even it could if it can only switch in once or twice the second reason that offense teams can get away with more is that they apply more pressure on the opponent making the more maneuverable teams overall if a hyper offense team has nothing that can take a Ice Beam well they can at least prevent the kurum from entering with the use of Stealth Rock and the threat of constant powerful setup if the user finds a good opportunity to bring it in perhaps they can get a kill against the hyper offense user but the damage takes will likely make it very easy to Revenge kill compare this to a bulk your team with nothing that can take an ice beam well will be able to slowly and patiently get kill after kill decimating the opponent's defensive core this is an important principle to understand as it's going to be relevant in all the following methods to cut Corners the more offensive a team is the more likely it is to accept missing components and still be a great team now you can probably get away with not having a resistance to almost any type as long as it's only one or two and you're prepared for all the common threats of that type but there are four particularly disastrous types to lack or resist to I have never seen a good team lack a resistance to any of these types the first one is dark King Gambit exists as well as a lot of fast and strong dark types like like dark Ryan roaring Moon if you need TOA to get a dark resist your team is almost guaranteed to be terrible next up is grass reloom in particular and to a lesser extent meow Scara will destroy your team if you need to Terra to get a grass resist next up is water there are a ton of strong water types in U like ogron Wellspring and if you run into a rain team you're absolutely toast without a water resist and lastly steal if King Gambit can click iron head and Gango can click Make It Rain for free against you you simply do not have a good team one other thing I want to mention is that I'm not encouraging lacking resistances to any types generally speaking lacking a resistance to even a single type automatically makes a team terrible but there are rare situations where it's okay and that's all I'm trying to teach often times though if you find yourself in a position where you need to have uh lack a type resistance probably it would be better to rebuild but if the team is strong enough in other areas and isn't weak to the main Pokemon of that type it can sometimes be okay now let's talk about ground and electric immunities the immunity to ground is quite negotiable there are a lot of ground types in OU but none of them are particularly threatening offensively Swords Dance glcore and headlong Rush offensive great Tusk are the only two you really need to keep in mind resists like ogre Pon Wellspring Superior and strong physical walls like alola zamazenta and dondoo can often handle these threats as well still if you don't have a ground immunity I highly recommend slapping a couple of Terra flying Pokemon and or an air balloon or two on your team otherwise you're going to get absolutely destroyed if you face a rare set like Choice band great Tusk or Choice band Garchomp having an electric immunity is much less negoti Choice Spec's raging bolt is rising in popularity and it isn't going anywhere the only time it's okay to not have an electric immunity is if you have a hyper offense team that is particularly strong against raging bolt I'm talking about things like extreme speed Dragonite substitute iron Valiant sweepers with Terror ground bulky sweepers that resist electric like gouging fire and similar Pokemon but almost every single team in the current metagame is going to want an electric community let's move on to hazards but before we do that please remember to subscribe like and leave a comment if you're enjoying the video I'm on my way to 10K and that would be an incredible Benchmark to hit anyway though first we'll discuss setting hazards and then removal almost every team should be able to set hazards at least stealth rocker spikes although both are nice sticky web teams can forgo both of these in favor of setting webs very very few teams should be hazardless the only style I would recommend abandoning hazards entirely is dual screens Aurora Veil teams often it's not worth having a hazard Setter when you already need a screen Setter some other forms of hyper offense can abandon hazards successfully as well now on to removal there are six main ways to deal with hazards rapid spin from great Tusk iron Treads or Excadrill defog from corvite Court change cerase mortal spin from glamora Magic Bounce from hatterene tidy up Mouse hold or Cino and some might say ignoring removal altogether and running a ton of heavy duty boots it's a bit outside the scope of this video to discuss when to use these various methods but let me know in the comments section if you guys would like a video on how to deal with hazards right now I'm going to tell you when it's okay to use none of these Methods at all you almost always want some form of Hazard control but some hyper offense teams can get away with running none at all certain offense teams can as well not just any offense or hyper offense though you need one that doesn't significantly mine Stealth Rock or a layer of spikes you probably also want a taunt lead something like meow skarada Deoxys speed or Greninja to avoid the opponent setting hazards if possible even then you'll probably still want to run some heavy duty boots Pokémon that being said if you have all these things it's probably okay to ignore having any form of Hazard control or removal next up is fast and priority Pokemon these next team requirements break the mold a little bit since this is the first item on our list that's easier for bulky team teams to abandon than more offensive teams the main reason for priority shutting down sweepers or Revenge killing um but if you have a lot of bulky or unaware po you probably don't need priority as much since a sweeper is unlikely to get out of hand just make sure that you have very solid answers to all the common sweepers and other General bulky Pokemon and unaware Pokemon if you decide to abandon priority the main reason for having fast Pokemon is Revenge killing and outspeeding threatening powerful Breakers if your team has strong priority and a lot of bulky Pokémon you can perhaps let this slide still you almost always want to have at least one fast Pokémon the only team style that can regularly abandon having any speed at all is hard stall lastly we have knockoff this is without a doubt one of the best moves in competitive singles it's powerful removes the opponent's item thus significantly nerfing them and it's almost completely free to click early on in the game since you're almost always bound to remove an item but when is it okay to run a team without knockoff one of the things that makes knockoff so great is that it doesn't just hurt when it hits it hurts your opponent the rest of the game since they won't have their item anymore every time that knocked Pokemon is on the field is a turn where that move benefits your team therefore the teams that are most okay with abandoning knockoff are the teams that generate the shortest games hyper offense and some offense teams don't mind lacking knockoff at all but something like balance is never okay with dropping knockoff and bulkier builds are absolutely never okay with dropping knockoff if you have a team that's balance or bulkier and you don't have a knockoff user take a serious look at your team and ask yourself if it's worth it remember that all these things I talked about in the video are how and when to dodge these team requirements when absolutely necessary I am not at all encouraging skimping on things like priority speed control type resistances or anything else but sometimes sacrifices need to be made and it's important to know when to do it right I hope you guys enjoyed the video have a great day feel free to leave any questions in the comments and I'll see you guys next time