All Six Are Live All Game: Plug Your Team's Role Gaps With a Checklist

BASIC Hook: The game you lost was usually a missing role, not a weak Pokémon

Think of a loss you couldn't explain. The opponent set up one Dragon Dance sweeper and ran through your whole team, and you scrolled your six looking for an answer — nothing outran it after the boost, no priority move to finish it before it swept. That wasn't a misplay. You left the "speed check" role vacant at teambuild time.

Here's the core difference from doubles: doubles is bring-6-pick-4, so you can stash one or two tech Pokémon that only come out against specific structures and stay benched otherwise. In singles you register a team, and all six can be in play across the entire battle — there is no "just in case" slot. So your six must cover every threat category in the singles meta on their own. This lesson teaches you, before you open the Builder, to use one checklist to confirm your six has no fatal blank.

BASIC Core: The six roles of a singles team (one Pokémon can fill several)

Turn "is this team good?" into something you can actually check. A healthy singles team usually covers these jobs — note these are six roles, not six different Pokémon:

The mental model: confirm no role is completely vacant, then start tuning numbers. A bulky Pokémon with Stealth Rock and Recover can be both your hazard setter and your stall anchor — that's fine. What kills you is a row in this table with no name in it at all.

INTERMEDIATE Worked → Faded: Break down a team, find the hole

Fully worked. Say your six are Garchomp, Charizard (Mega Y), Ferrothorn, Rotom-Wash, Tyranitar, Azumarill. Fill the table row by row:

• Hazards: Garchomp sets Stealth Rock, Ferrothorn sets Spikes ✓ (you even have layers)
• Win condition core: Charizard Mega Y as the wallbreaker/ceiling, Azumarill with Belly Drum as a second route ✓
• Wallbreaker: Charizard Mega Y + Azumarill ✓
• Glue: Rotom-Wash (broad typing, Levitate dodges Earthquake) ✓
• Hazard removal: Tyranitar? Rotom-Wash? — none of them runs Rapid Spin or Defog ✗
• Speed check: your fastest is Garchomp at roughly 169 Speed (32 SP, +nature, Lv 50). A max-Speed Gyarados (base 81 Speed → ~146 at Lv 50, ~219 after +1 Dragon Dance) blows past your entire team. No Choice Scarf, no priority ✗

Verdict: huge firepower, but two roles are missing — hazard removal and a speed check. The result is exactly the Hook loss: chipped out by your own rocks, or swept by one setup mon. The fix isn't grinding Garchomp harder — it's swapping a slot for something that can Defog or hold a Choice Scarf.

Your turn (faded). Take your own six and fill the same six rows. Check the two slots that go vacant most often first: (1) who removes hazards off your side? (2) when the opponent's +1 sweeper is sitting around 195–220 Speed after a boost, which of your six handles it first? If you can't write a name on either row, you've found the hole.

INTERMEDIATE When / Decision: When to run this checklist

• If you see an obvious setup sweeper on the opponent's team at Team Preview (Dragon Dance / Swords Dance potential) and you have no Choice Scarf user and no priority move → you probably get swept, and you should have built in a speed check.
• If you run Stealth Rock but have no removal and the opponent also has rocks → your switches cost more than theirs (especially with a 4×-rock-weak member like Charizard) → you need Defog / Rapid Spin.
• If all six rows are filled but two of them lean on the same Pokémon → when it faints, two roles collapse at once. The priority there is "spread the load," not "add more stats."

INTERMEDIATE/ADVANCED Exceptions: Where the simple checklist breaks

• Hyper offense deliberately skips hazard removal. It uses speed and pressure so the opponent never gets to switch repeatedly and trigger rocks — the pace is fast enough that hazard chip can't add up in time. That isn't a missing role; it's trading the "removal" role for the resource "offensive tempo." Just know you're making that trade on purpose.
• Mega Gengar's Shadow Tag + Perish Song trap is a win condition that needs neither setup nor wallbreaking — it locks the opponent's win con in and counts it down to zero. Here the "win condition core" row is filled by an entirely different mechanic, and the checklist still counts it as covered.
• You get exactly one Mega Evolution per team. Don't waste that slot on a role a non-Mega could do (a pure hazard setter, say). The Mega should fill the highest-ceiling seat: a Dragon Dance Mega sweeper stacks the Mega Evolution base-stat jump AND its boost stages at once, so always run that damage through the calculator — don't eyeball it.
• Status is nerfed in Champions, so don't treat "Toxic stall + paralysis lock" as the reliable win con it was in older formats: paralysis full-stop dropped from 25% to 12.5% (Speed is still halved), sleep is capped at 3 turns. Stall still works, but its ability to lock an opponent down is weaker than you remember.

INTERMEDIATE/ADVANCED Mistake-Autopsy: The one beginners always make

Mistake: picking all six as "Pokémon I think are strong," and ending up with four mid-speed physical sweepers. Each looks scary alone, but in practice one bulky Water wall holds the whole team, because you have no special wallbreaker, no status, no second way to win. That's the classic "six strong Pokémon, zero win-condition diversity" collapse.

Why it happens: you evaluated each pick on "is this strong?" instead of "which role does this fill on my team?" Strength is absolute; a role is relative to the team around it.

The fix: use the table to place holders first — assign one candidate to each of the six roles — and then optimize stats/sets within each role. Reverse that order and you stack a redundant all-star squad. Remember the rule: a functionally complete team beats six individually strong Pokémon with no win condition.

INTERMEDIATE Predict-then-Reveal: Answer before you look

Your team: Garchomp (rocks), Ferrothorn (spikes), Charizard Mega Y, Rotom-Wash, Tyranitar, Azumarill. The opponent drops Stealth Rock turn one, and you need to switch often to win trades. Q: which single missing role is this team's worst structural problem, and why does it hurt you more than the opponent?

Answer it yourself, then read on.

The missing role is hazard removal (no Defog / Rapid Spin). It hurts you more because your Charizard Mega Y is Fire/Flying — 4× weak to rock — so every time it switches in it loses half its HP, and one layer of rocks can take it from full to "anything KOs it" in a single turn. The opponent has no such 4× member, so the same pile of rocks taxes you far more than them. Fix: swap Tyranitar or another slot for something that runs Defog, or rebuild toward a hyper-offense pace that never has to keep switching Charizard back in.

ADVANCED Now-Do-This: Run a role audit on your own team in the Builder

Open the Builder (CTA) and run this exact sequence — this is deliberate practice, not "go poke around":

1. Make the six-row table. Drop your current six into the six roles above. One Pokémon can occupy several rows, but note which rows lean on the same one.
2. Flag the red rows. Which role has nobody in it? Which role rests on a single Pokémon (when it faints, two cells collapse)?
3. Run the speed comparison. In the Builder, check your fastest member's Speed stat, then compare it to a common +1 sweeper's boosted Speed (many land in the 195–220 range at Lv 50). Can you move first? If not, the speed check is vacant.
4. Audit the Mega slot. Is your Mega Evolution on the highest-ceiling seat? If it's doing a job a non-Mega could do, move the slot to a member that actually needs the ceiling raised.
5. Plug exactly one hole. Change one slot this pass, aimed at the reddest row. Then go back to step 1 and re-audit — don't blow up the whole team at once.

Finish and you'll have a team where every row has a name on it, instead of a stack of individually strong all-stars that leaks as a group.