Our first season with the new DLCdex. About anther hundred brand new Pokémon have been added to the roster. Just how much has this season changed things up?

For this season, I decided to celebrate the DLCdex and only use Pokémon that were introduced in the DLC. A fun challenge to break up the past three seasons of playing almost identical teams. As this season introduced and rewarded players with a Baxcalibright, I figured the universe was doing the hard work for me. Was that a good idea, though? Well...

I will say one thing about this particular Pokémon separate from its actual performance. Baxcalibur is locked behind the DLC. Baxcalibur is specifically located in a Five Star Distortion, which means this is a Post-Post DLC Pokémon. Then I had to roll the dice and hope I got a Baxcalibur. I ended up just barely getting one in time. Check out Z–A's DLC Problem: Why Does This Game Love Grinding??? for more information on that nightmare.

I decided to lead with Armarouge. For those of you who didn't play this season, Armarouge was a decent rogue option for its special typing. I saw many Armarouges during my run and, while they didn't define the meta, they added another option against Fighting- and Poison-types (not to mention bullying poor little Glaceons). I did not play that build. I didn't think of it. I played a Shield Armarouge build that happened to also snipe enemy Glaceons, Lucarios, and Gengars. It worked, don't get me wrong, I just probably didn't play the most standard build.

Annihilape is a Pokémon I had a lot of experience with already, both in Scarlet & Violet as a Raid Counter and in this game as a Hyperspace Counter. Annihilape is really good for PvE content, but it also fit a niche among the Ghost-types in the format. With a Shell Bell, this Fighting/Ghost was immune to Fighting-type threats and could heal on top of it. Annihilape could not heal as fast as it could in PvE Hyperspace runs, but it still kept itself healthy.

Mega Baxcalibur's role was to essentially nuke the field if my opponents got greedy and played too many Ice-types at the same time. When Baxcalibur was able to take advantage of this role, it worked really well. Unfortunately, there were seldom two Dragons on at the same time that Baxcalibur made it over there, and many Pokémon had Fire-type moves prepared for bullying Glaceons.

Rank	Game	Me	P2	P3	P4
Rank Z	#1	8	5	1	3
Rank U	#2	8	2	0	9
Rank R	#3	5	7	5	5
Rank P	#4	7	4	5	2
Rank N	#5	7	3	4	4
Rank M	#6	5	1	4	4
Rank L	#7	8	5	1	2
Rank J	#8	3	1	4	6
	#9	14	2	2	2
Rank H	#10	6	3	1	0
	#11	6	4	1	2
Rank G	#12	8	2	3	7
Rank F	#13	4	4	8	DC
	#14	7	4	3	6
Rank E	#15	2	2	5	0
	#16	5	7	2	3
	#17	3	2	5	2
Rank D	#18	4	1	9	0
	#19	10	3	2	3
	#20	4	7	2	3
Rank C	#21	8	4	4	1
	#22	8	2	4	4
Rank B	#23	6	1	5	6
	#24	7	0	4	4
	#25	3	6	5	DC
	#26	3	1	6	4
	#27	2	3	7	1
	#28	3	1	7	3
	#29	1	5	8	2

Yeah... so... it didn't quite work as intended...

Part of the problem was that I had many hacked games. Not all of the losses were hacked games, but it's certainly demoralizing getting so many. Especially those last five games. The last one in particular had two hackers; I only managed to get a knock out because they were attacking each other in the beginning and I managed to snipe the survivor.

What made it especially frustrating was that I had my Armarouge and Annihilape specially EV trained to survive certain hits even through stat boosts, field effects, and Plus Moves that they were still somehow getting one-shot through.

Regardless of the hackers, Baxcalibur was not as effective as I was hoping it would be. Like I said earlier, Baxcalibur did not get to see its niche among the Dragons that often. When it did, Baxcalibur ironically became another Dragon on field, practically daring everyone to start spamming Dragon-type moves (not that they would have done much to Baxcalibur, but still).

I'm happy to say most of the format was new Pokémon. I saw a total of two players out of eighty-seven also played the Armarouge + Annihilape core (and one played Screen Armarouge so I wasn't completely off base with that idea).

If I were to do the season over again, I think I'd just swap Baxcalibur with literally any other Dragon. This team has enough counters to Ice that it'd be worth the risk. Perhaps a Garchomp or Gyarados again? Mega Garchomp is historically good for raw damage output, and I already knew Gyarados would be a good choice.