Team analysis: type coverage and speed tiers

How to read a drafted Pokémon roster the way strong coaches do: coverage grids, speed tiers, and role balance, plus how to catch the gaps while the draft is still running.

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A drafted roster is not yet a team. It’s eight to twelve Pokémon who happen to share an owner, and between the draft and week one every coach does the same quiet work: figuring out what the collection actually does, where it’s strong, and, more urgently, where it’s soft. Strong coaches use three lenses for that work: type coverage, speed tiers, and role balance. This guide covers each lens, then the point where the analysis matters most: mid-draft, while the gaps can still be fixed. (For the format itself, from pools and budgets to season play, see running a Pokémon draft league.)

Type coverage: two grids, not one

Coverage analysis is two separate questions that coaches habitually blur together, so keep the grids apart.

Defensive coverage: for each attacking type, how many of your Pokémon resist it, and how many are weak to it? Lay your roster against all eighteen types and the picture appears immediately. A stack of shared weaknesses is the classic draft accident: three excellent picks who all happen to fold to the same common attacking type, which means one opposing Pokémon can trade through half your core. A roster with no weaknesses doesn’t exist. What you want is weaknesses that aren’t stacked, and at least one comfortable answer to the attacking types you’ll face every single week.

Offensive coverage: the mirror grid. Across your realistic movesets (the moves your Pokémon will actually run, rather than the whole learnset), which defensive profiles can you hit hard, and which walls just… wall you? Every league has a handful of famous defensive Pokémon that decide games by being unanswerable. If your roster’s honest answer to one of them is “we lose slowly,” you want to learn that in the draft room rather than at team preview.

Two cautions keep the grids honest. Abilities and items bend coverage math: an immunity ability turns a paper weakness into a free switch, and coverage that depends on one item is coverage your opponent can play around. And offensive coverage is about the four moves you’ll really click, so audit sets, not species pages.

Speed tiers: the games decided before turn one

When two Pokémon threaten to knock each other out, the faster one simply wins the exchange. Enough of those exchanges pile up that many games are effectively decided by the speed chart before either player clicks a move.

The tool here is a speed-tier list: every relevant Pokémon in the league sorted by speed stat, with your roster highlighted. Read yours against an opponent’s and you learn the shape of the game instantly: which of your attackers move first against their team, which of their threats outpace your whole roster, and where the exact ties sit. Details that decide close games live on this chart: investment choices that let a bulky Pokémon sneak over a benchmark, items that trade power for speed or speed for power, and abilities or moves that rewrite the order mid-game.

A roster-level warning sign: speed clumping. If your whole team occupies the same middle band, then every opponent who invested in the bands above you moves first all game, and you have no slow, bulky anchor built to take hits either. Good rosters spread across the chart, with genuine speed at the top, real bulk at the bottom, and a plan for the opponents who out-speed everything.

Role balance: modes, redirection, speed control

The third lens ignores types and stats entirely and asks what jobs your Pokémon do. A team of six great attackers is a bad team; matches are won by rosters that can assemble a functioning six for each opponent, which means the draft has to cover roles.

• Modes. Can your roster play more than one way? A team that only attacks has no answer to the matchup where attacking doesn’t work. You want at least two modes, whether that’s hyper-aggression plus a bulkier, longer game or a setup win condition plus attrition, so your team preview isn’t an open book.
• Speed control. Especially in doubles, moves and abilities that reorder the turn, by slowing the opponents down or moving your side up, are so valuable that most winning teams carry more than one source. If your draft ends with zero, every game will be played at your opponent’s pace.
• Redirection and support. Doubles again: Pokémon that pull attacks away from a partner, provide screens or healing, or otherwise spend their turn making a teammate’s turn better. They’re cheap in the draft and decisive on the field, and they’re the classic hole in rosters drafted purely by looking at price tags.
• Pivots and glue. The unglamorous middle: Pokémon that switch in safely, take a hit, and keep the game moving. Every roster needs a couple; no one ever brags about drafting them.

Role analysis is also your scouting lens. Run the same audit on next week’s opponent: no speed control means your fast mode plays unopposed; one thin defensive backbone means that’s the Pokémon your whole game plan should aim at.

Mid-draft is when analysis pays

Everything above is pleasant homework after a draft and decisive during one. The draft is the only time the gaps are still fixable: after pick five, “we stack a weakness to a common attacking type and have no speed control” is a shopping list; after the draft, it’s a season-long apology.

Doing this analysis live used to mean alt-tabbing between a type chart, a speed spreadsheet, and the draft board while your pick timer ran. Fundrafted folds it into the draft room: as your roster grows, the analysis panel keeps your defensive and offensive coverage grids and your speed-tier position current, pick by pick, and flags the gaps (stacked weaknesses, missing roles, speed clumping) while the pieces that fix them are still on the board. It won’t tell you who to pick. It keeps your attention on what the roster needs instead of whatever the shiniest name on the board happens to be. That pull between what the board offers and what the team requires is the whole craft of drafting; the general version lives in snake drafts, budgets, and pick strategy.

The weekly loop

Post-draft, team analysis settles into the season’s rhythm. Each week, pull up the opponent’s roster and run the three lenses against it: their coverage holes, the speed chart of their likely six against yours, their missing roles. Then check their replays to see which of their options they actually use, and build your six for that specific game rather than for the abstract idea of their team. Coaches who do this every week still lose games, but they’re rarely surprised, and across a season that’s the biggest edge there is.