Happy Z–A Season, everyone! It's time to go over Season 06. Season 06 returns every Pokémon to the roster (except Hoopa Unbound, again), with a limited set restricted to a single member per team.

I had been meaning to build a team around Mewtwo for a while, so I started by locking in my single Restricted Pokémon. Mewtwo is weak to Ghost and Dark, so I would need to pick two Pokémon to cover those weaknesses. Let's see how well Mewtwo fared this season.

I decided I wanted to try out a pure offensive team this season rather than try to build with a certain lead in mind, see what difference it would make. Unlike VGC formats, you have time to change your Pokémon and adjust during a match before the battle truly begins.

Like I said earlier, I already knew going in that I wanted to build Mewtwo for this season. The only reason I wanted to play Mewtwo specifically was that I accidentally planned around building Mewtwo in an earlier season not realizing it would not be legal that season. Mewtwo would be weak to Bug, Ghost, and Dark, so I would need Pokémon to cover those gaps.

Marshadow almost completely negates the rare Bug-type threats to Mewtwo and is capable of stealing stat changes from other Pokémon, giving Marshadow additional utility even if a match-up isn't one-sided in your favor. It's still weak to Ghost-types, though, and it's netural to Dark-type.

Finally, Magearna would provide coverage for that Dark-type that hadn't been covered yet, and turns the otherwise Ghost pure weakness into a neutral option for the team. Magearna also helps cover the weaknesses that Marshadow brings to the table

	Game	Me	P2	P3	P4
Rank Z	#1	2	1	3	7
Rank X	#2	6	4	3	8
Rank T	#3	11	4	1	2
Rank P	#4	10	4	2	6
Rank M	#5	10	DQ	3	2
Rank K	#6	8	0	2	9
Rank J	#7	4	1	4	5
	#8	6	6	5	2
Rank I	#9	6	4	3	6
Rank H	#10	6	6	3	2
Rank G	#11	6	4	1	4
	#12	7	2	2	8
Rank F	#13	4	8[1]	4	1
Rank E	#14	1	5	3	7
	#15	9	2	2	3
	#16	5	4	8	5
Rank D	#17	6	2	1	11
	#18	7	1	6	4
Rank C	#19	3	7	5	3
	#20	6	6	4	8
	#21	6	2	6	2
	#22	7	3	4	2
Rank B	#23	6	2	3	4
	#24	7	6	2	6
	#25	5	2	5	6
	#26	6	7	2	2

When I finished this season, I was frustrated by how poorly I did this season. I mean, I only won fifty percent of my matches after trying to take this season seriously? It was certainly demoralizing, and I wasn't even sure what I could have done differently at the time!

But as I re-compiled my notes onto Rukinations and put that pie chart together, I realized I could have done a lot worse. Did starting with a third place run sting a bit? Yeah, it did, but that was my first of three matches I'd call outright "bad." Even if almost half of my matches were second places, they were still mostly great runs. And almost all of those second place runs were behind by one or two points.

Truth be told, I'm not sure what I would have done different had I had to replay this season (minus the standard "Play a better team." Instinctively, I probably could have made better calls and predicted other Pokémon swapping better, but that reaches into the realm of hindsight.

I can't say I didn't like the team. The team itself seemed to at least work internally (not to mention it still won 50% of games). I think the bigger problem was that I personally could have done better with this team and just didn't do as well as I could have.

^[1] My notes have an asterix next to this score in particular and I cannot for the life of me remember why. I don't think it was a hacked match because I've faced more one-sided matches (and won some) and don't normally care enough to track hacked matches unless they particularly got on my nerves. Let's say they ran a team of the three Eeveelutions and call it a day.