Things You Should Have Before You Get Into Competitive Pokemon Battling

The Top Ten

1 The Understanding of EV's and IV's

2 The Understanding of Certain Natures

3 The Understanding of What Some Hold Items Do

4 The Understanding of the Physical/Split

5 Good Walls

The most common mistake of new competitive players is that they have a team of all sweepers, which is not that bad in a few cases but most of the time it is. Walls are Pokemon that eat up hits like Rotom Wash.

Oh so fun to utilize, but awful to face.

6 Have Pokemon That Don't Have All Have One Type of Move

7 A Good Idea of What Pokemon Are In Which Tier and Why.

8 Pokemon That Don't Have HM'S Besides Surf

The reason I'm allowing surf on a Pokemon is cause it's powerful, but even then it loses it's potency to moves like hydro pump and scald

9 The Awareness of Entry Hazards

These will definitely be the most important to understand before going into competitive battling, because you probably wont be used to utilizing them to their full potential in the games.

10 A Good Playlist for Battling

I know this sounds silly, but (at least for me) this relaxes me and takes of the pressure of misclicks. My playlist consists of song like Welcome to the Jungle, Back in Black, and Aces High

The Contenders

11 Understanding of Abilities

12 A Smogon Account

Whenever you make a team you can ask people to rate it so they'll let you know how noobish you are. Good for learning everything about pokemon.

13 Understanding of Various Pokemon's Base Stats

14 Understanding of Various Moves

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