Pyritie
TAMAGO
The main purpose of support mons is to make your heavy hitters even better. This can range from buying free turns through fake out, to using speed control to make the other team go after you, to drawing away attacks the rest of your team is weak to.Not sure if SQSA is better for this question, but I"ll ask it here: How do you guys justify using mons completely for support on your teams? As somebody who's just picking VGC up, when I'm teambuilding, most of the time my thought process is something like "Wow I'm weak to Kartana... maybe I should add Arcanine so I can KO it and weaken its damage output." So most of my teams end up looking somewhat similar and running 6 mons who don't support much and just KO other mons, kind of like you'd build a team in singles. Running a pokemon like Persian or Togedemaru who's entire existence is based on using support moves never really crosses my mind, and I never really understand the thought process behind adding one of them to your team. How do you know if one of them is the "right" pokemon to add?
Some examples:
Togedemaru buys a free turn for its partner with fake out. It can slow down the opponent with nuzzle, and then can use zing zip's 30% flinch rate to try and paraflinch things. It also makes the opponent afraid to even use electric-type attacks that aren't discharge while it's on the field.
Alolan persian is fast and uses fake out like togedemaru does. It can get off fast snarls to make special attackers less threatening, buying you both momentum (your opponent will want to switch them out later) and making your teammates survive more attacks. Then it's got a bunch of other support moves to make it harder for your opponent to try and gain control of the battle, like feint, quash, taunt, etc. Then it can use foul play to still deal damage to things so it can't just be ignored.