Pokemon Showdown is the most popular sim online for creating and building test Pokemon teams. As a free, unofficial battle simulator, Pokemon Showdown gives would be competitors the opportunity to test teams online.

It has unranked and ranked ladders with a full ELO system. This means you’ll always be able to match up into players of your own skill level. The ability to generate and edit Pokemon allows players to make minute adjustments without restarting from zero. If a team isn’t working the way it was intended, or needs finer tuning into the meta, you can do so on the fly.

Source: HowAndroidHelp

How to Use Pokemon Showdown Team Builder

Showdown’s team builder is easy to use. You can create teams for particular formats and validate teams to make sure they’re compliant with the ruleset. Remember Pokemon are individually searchable too! But also, due to being created from text files, they can be imported and exported for sharing with ease. An example of the format that Pokemon exist on Showdown is as follows:

Gastrodon @ Life Orb
Level: 50
Tera Type: Fire
Ability: Storm Drain
EVs: 252 HP / 0 Atk / 4 Def / 252 SpA / 0 SpD / 0 Spe
Quiet Nature
IVs: 31 HP / 31 Atk / 31 Def / 31 SpA / 31 SpD / 0 Spe
– Protect
– Earth Power
– Ice Beam
– Muddy Water

Here, you can see that you can include the Pokemon name, level, ability, stats and moves. This is basically all you need to get started and build the best Pokemon team.

Formats and Replays

Pokemon Showdown allows players to play VGC formats as well as singles formats from the current and older generations. While the damage calculations aren’t exactly 1:1, Pokemon Showdown has done a largely fantastic job of reverse engineering the battle environment of the modern Pokemon games.

Time spent battling in this simulator allows you to spend less time raising and tuning teams. For casual fans of Pokemon that don’t want to pay for every new release and DLC that the mainline games bring, a free simulator to play certainly helps. Even if the simulator isn’t official like the TCG client.

Analyzing your play is an important part of improving. Showdown having a replay system that saves chat logs, and battle history to replay the match turn by turn is a fantastic way of analyzing your play. Unfortunately, due to not being a 1:1 recreation of the main games, these replays cannot be transferred over to the mainline games. You’ll have to sacrifice visual spectacle for convenience of play.