Introduction
Spiritomb fulfills a very unique role in the January 2025 metagame. With a measly 7% in usage, Spiritomb isn’t too prominent so far. With an amazing defensive typing and a very solid offensive typing in this metagame, especially with the prominence of Psychic-types such as Mesprit, Reuniclus, and, most importantly, Slowbro, it’s kind of surprising why it isn’t used more. Spiritomb gets access to two very useful abilities: Pressure and Infiltrator. Infiltrator allows Spiritomb to bypass Substitute, a very useful trait to have in a month where Substitutes are more common than you might expect. The weaker of the two abilities, but by no means bad, Pressure is a very good option for more defensive or stall variants of Spiritomb. Against some Pokémon, like Shaymin, whose main attacking options have relatively low PP, Spiritomb can take advantage of Pressue to easily PP stall them. Spiritomb has a very even stat spread, with 108 in both defenses and 92 in both attack stats, allowing it to be very versatile in the ways it can be used. It gets access to solid STAB options in both stats, such as Dark Pulse, Shadow Ball, Poltergeist, and Sucker Punch. It also has the added bonus of being one of the few mons in this meta to get STAB priority, that being Shadow Sneak.
Spiritomb can also be a great utility mon with access to: Will-O-Wisp, to cripple physical threats like Crawdaunt, Virizion, and Golurk; Trick Room, to be an option for Trick Room teams with its low Speed stat of 35 being useful in it; Pain Split, for a good healing option and whittling down bulky mons; Memento, as a decent pivoting option and allowing your sweepers to come in for free; and Taunt, to stop the very prevalent status moves like Toxic, Calm Mind, Recover, Rocks, and Teleport on Slowbro.
Physically Defensive Utility Set
With Max HP & Max Defense, this set allows Spiritomb to survive hits from the strongest Physical mons. Being able to survive Banded Flare Blitzes from Infernape, Banded Poltergeists from Golurk, and even Banded Adaptability Crabhammers from Crawdaunt, makes Spiritomb a real bulky threat. Leftovers or Healing Berries are both solid items for this set, but itemless might be the best option to avoid Poltergeists from Golurk or take Knocks from Crawdaunt and retaliate with a Wisp.
Trick Room Sweeper
Spiritomb is a pretty reliable Trick Room Setter and sweeper thanks to its great bulk and low speed. This set allows it to be a very hard hitting special sweeper that isn't walled by Clodsire, thanks to Psyshock. It mainly struggles with dark types, but that can be easily negated if you drop Trick Room and just run it on another mon.
Written by Unitz