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Pokémon Sun and Moon competitive training guide - how to raise the best, strongest Pokémon for the Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon metagame

Everything you need to know for forming the perfect, competition-ready team for Gen 7.

Training competitive Pokémon viable for use in the Pokémon Ultra Sun and Moon metagame takes a hefty amount of work.

As many die-hard players will tell you, the standard practice from the main story - raising a cool Pokémon up to a high level and sticking some high-damage moves on it - isn't going to get you very far.

Instead, if you want to have any kind of success playing online, or in the demanding Battle Tree and Battle Royal modes, you'll need to do some real work, involving complex breeding chains, item farming, strategic training, and more. Here in this guide, we'll be telling you exactly how to do all of that, step by step, so players of any level can get their hands on the strongest Pokémon possible.

Note that, as of Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon's release, we're still updating this page to double check all of the below methods work. In theory though they're all the same - so don't expect many changes!

Cover image for YouTube videoDo Pokémon Sun and Moon finally prove a weird fan theory?
Do Pokémon Sun and Moon finally prove a weird fan theory?

Pokémon Sun and Moon competitive training - how to raise the best Pokémon possible for battling in Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon

As we mentioned above, there are several steps involved if you want to acquire the perfect battling Pokémon and, believe it or not, each of the steps is absolutely essential. In the competitive scene, battles can be lost because you're just one stat point short of the maximum, and if you want to hit that maximum in all the right areas, you're going to need to put in the work.

Generally, if you want to build a competition-ready team, all of your Pokémon will need to have Perfect IVs, Perfect EVs, and the optimal Nature, Ability, Moves, and held item. It's a fair bit to balance, so below we've gathered together guides for everything you need.

Pokémon Ultra Sun and Moon Competitive Training Guides

You're going to want to decide what 'build' you want for your team first - which Pokémon, moves, Natures and everything else you deem the best - but that's a whole other kettle of fish, and it depends much more on both the state of the metagame at the time, your strategy, and just your own personal taste (this is for fun too, after all!).

This guide, however, aims to show you how to actually go about it once you've decided what it is you want to achieve, be that a comedy team full of Special Attacking Magikarps or a top-tier competition squad.

How to get the strongest Pokémon team in Ultra Sun and Moon

With all that in mind then, here's the step-by-step process for creating the perfect competitive team:

  1. Decide on your strategy, team, and Pokémon builds.
  2. Breed Pokémon and pass down the best Ability, Nature, Egg Moves and Poké Ball of your choice.
  3. Hyper Train your chosen Pokémon to maximum strength - use our Pokémon Sun and Moon IVs and base stats guide for more understanding, and our Sun and Moon Bottle Caps farming and Hyper Training guide for a rapid method to speed things up.
  4. EV Train your Pokémon using our Pokémon Sun and Moon EV training locations guide.

And you're done! We'll be updating this guide very soon with some added detail, so keep on checking back for more, and don't forget to check out our main Pokémon Sun and Moon walkthrough and strategy guide hub for everything else!