Teams based around the move Trick Room are among the most popular in the Pokémon Sword and Shield meta right now. Trick Room offers teams valuable speed control while allowing Pokémon to invest in stats other than Speed.
While Trick Room teams are powerful, breeding Pokémon for them is slightly different than breeding for other teams. Under the effects of Trick Room, the slowest Pokémon moves first, so it is important to breed Pokémon with 0 (listed as “No Good” in-game) Speed IVs and a -Speed nature to get them as slow as possible.
Nature
Each Nature increases one stat by 10% and decreases another by 10%. The first step is breeding for a Nature that decreases Speed and increases the desired stat. Here they are:
Brave: +Attack -Speed
Quiet: +Special Attack -Speed
Relaxed: +Defense -Speed
Sassy: +Special Defense -Speed
Let’s say we are breeding for Rhyperior, a popular Trick Room Pokémon. We would want to take the Brave Nature to increase its Attack while dropping its Speed. This can be done by finding a Pokémon that Rhyhorn/Rhydon/Rhyperior can breed with that has a Brave Nature, giving it an Everstone, then having it breed with a female Rhyhorn (or a male if its another Rhyhorn or a Ditt0).
IVs
Once we have a Brave Rhyhorn, we need to get 0 Speed IVs. This part can be tricky, as IVs are usually random. The best way to do this is to find a Ditto with 5 perfect IVs and a 0 Speed IV. We can get this by trading, or catching Dittos in Max Raid Battles until we get lucky with the IVs. Let’s assume we aren’t able to find one, however.
Without a Ditto with the desired IVs, we will have to breed it up from scratch. The first step is to find another male Pokémon in Rhyhorn’s egg group that has a 0 Speed IV. Have this Pokémon hold a Power Anklet, and it will pass its Speed IV down to its offspring. Make sure to also give the female Rhyhorn the Everstone to pass its Brave Nature down.
Now we will have a Brave Rhyhorn with a 0 Speed IV. There are two options from here. We can level the Rhyhorn to 100 and Hyper Train the other IVs with Bottle Caps, or we can continue breeding until we have the perfect IVs.
If we want to continue breeding, we will need a 5IV Ditto with the imperfect IV being either Speed or Special Attack (Attack for a Special Attacker). Once we have this, we can give our Rhyhorn the Everstone and the Ditto a Destiny Knot. The Destiny Knot will ensure that the parents will pass down 5 of their IVs. This means there is a chance that there is a chance the offspring will have perfect HP, Attack, Defense, Special Defense IVs along with a 0 Speed IV.
To make this process faster, every time a Rhyhorn with more perfect IVs is hatched, have it hold the Everstone and breed with the Ditto. This will make it more likely for one of the five IVs passed down to be the one we want.
Once we have the perfect Trick Room Rhyhorn, we just have to evolve it, EV train it, and teach it some moves. Once we do that, we repeat the process for every Pokémon we want on our team.
