Pokemon teams discussion.

Here's where we can post our teams from the games and hopefully get some feedback/suggestions for them.

My SoulSilver team:

Skarmory
Feraligatr (Current Water HM User, holding Mystic Water)
Ampharos
Vulpix (Debating on this one)
Girafarig (Thinking about switching this for Xatu/Natu)
Machop

Aaaaand, begin.

Ampharos is too slow.
Vulpix is fairly mediocre but probably the best you can do at this stage unless you can get a Magmar from burned tower.
Girafarig is alright, better than Xatu if only because if you get Xatu half your team will be weak to electric types and you've no counter.
THat brings me to two of your pokemon are weak to electric types and you don't have a ground type.
Machop is good.
Feraligatr is good.
Skarmory is good.

My recent team that I beat a hack of Heart Gold to make it harder and so you could catch all pokemon without trading was: Blaziken (he was one of the starters for some reason) Venusaur (you could catch all the starters as one off encounters), Gengar, Dragonite, Aerodactyl and Ursuring.

So if I switch Jolteon for Ampharos and Magmar for Vulpix, who should be cut to make room for a ground-type and who should be added? Rhydon, Marowak, or Nidoking?

Well you've got a few options, it seems to me like your best ones though, would be to bring in a Xatu for Girarfarig and then get rid of Skarmory in favour of a ground type, like Marowak. This is mainly because type-wise, steel doesn't bring a lot to the table because you've covered both of the types it's strong against with Machop.

Your other option as I see it is to just swap a ground type for Machop, but that's not preferable in my opinion.

Raz wrote:

Well you've got a few options, it seems to me like your best ones though, would be to bring in a Xatu for Girarfarig and then get rid of Skarmory in favour of a ground type, like Marowak. This is mainly because type-wise, steel doesn't bring a lot to the table because you've covered both of the types it's strong against with Machop.

Your other option as I see it is to just swap a ground type for Machop, but that's not preferable in my opinion.

Skarmory is an OU Pokemon and is objectively the best Pokemon on his team. That's if he's looking to go competitive by any stretch of the meaning.

That means nothing in the main game though, what you really want are sweepers, skarmory relies on being a wall.

Raz wrote:

That means nothing in the main game though, what you really want are sweepers, skarmory relies on being a wall.

That's kind of what I was going for with him. This is kind of geared towards competition.

I've caught Magmar and will be working on him shortly. Can't do anything with Eevee until I get the National Pokedex.

Well if it's competitive you're going to have to work out if you want to go into OU or UU. Personally, when I was into it, I always went UO because it was more interesting. In OU everyone always uses the same few pokemon, so it becomes really predictable and repetitive.
UU though, has a lot of variety.

So based on that decision will dictate what you use on your team, and I'm not sure on which pokemon are in which in gen 4.

http://www.smogon.com/dp/tiers/ou

http://www.smogon.com/dp/tiers/uu

Those are the Gen 4 tiers for OU and UU.

So I think I should switch out my Girafarig for Exeggutor. That gives me some resistance to electric, as well as a way around it. Also, I can teach Earthquake to Machop if I need the damage to electric. I'll just have to hope that my cousin still has his copy of HeartGold so I can evolve it when the time comes.

Prince Doebler wrote:

So I think I should switch out my Girafarig for Exeggutor. That gives me some resistance to electric, as well as a way around it. Also, I can teach Earthquake to Machop if I need the damage to electric. I'll just have to hope that my cousin still has his copy of HeartGold so I can evolve it when the time comes.

Yes that's a pretty good idea, Feraligatr should be able to cover the extra fire weakness.

So how far are you going with the competitive thing? Are you just going to trounce your friends? That was probably my main motivation when all my friends had Pokemon G/S back in the day.

Once I get the National Dex, should I evolve Magmar into Magmortar? The boost in its Sp Attack is nice, but I'm somewhat worried about the speed loss. It goes from 93 to 83.

I'd say it's worth it, you lose 10 speed but you gain 10 in both defences in addition to the nice Sp Attack boost.