I can’t use some Pokemon in online battles

pokemon-black-2-white-2

My friend gave me some EV trained Pokemon to battle with. I went to join a match, but it said I could not battle. After trying each of the Pokemon one after another, the only one who could not was my tank, Ferrothorn. Is there a way to fix this? Or must I get a new member for the team?

Best Answer

Since you are using a Ferrothorn, which doesn't have access to banned moves (dark void and sky drop) and isn't banned in random match-making, there are a few possibilities:

  1. Your Ferrothorn is holding a banned item (only soul dew that I can remember), or a duplicate item (you can only have at most 1 of each item on your team for random matchmaking). If this is the case, you'll simply need to switch the item the Ferrothorn is holding to one that isn't banned and that another of your pokemon isn't holding.

  2. You didn't notice a second Ferrothorn in your team. You can only use 1 of each species in your team for random match-making. I doubt this is the case, but it is worth mentioning as it is a common enough mistake. To fix this, simply only take 1 Ferrothorn, rather than 2 or more.

  3. Your friend hacked the Ferrothorn. The random match-making in BW2 performs a small hack check on each Pokemon you're using before allowing you to battle. It's not infallible, but it does catch a lot of stuff. It's quite possible that your friend's "EV training" was actually just using an action replay to edit values which got picked up by the game's hack check. To fix this, you should get a new Pokemon, as you probably will never be able to get it into random match-making.