This thread is so dead it makes me sad x.x
I'll try to revive it and give my thoughts on the ou slots, then! Not rankings my team cuz obv biased reasons(my b for bad english):
Strongest ou is prob tdk+cbb, both are extremely solid players, good builders, and with enough tournament experience to not make missplays and shit. Not much to say.
2nd would be Tesung + DD. Tesung is just destroying everything rn and it's pretty obvious he'll have a fantastic record this year again. Obviously would rank him #1 as strongest ou player this year in general, great building and more than enough tour experience. Echelon didn't have the best year, with his only wcop win being from the amazingness of twave vs sam, which is why this team is not ranked #1 in ou. But he's still a great player with great building and tour experience, and he has more than enough support from tesung, dice and Ary to get back into the game. Definetly expecting at least a positive record.
3rd goes to Cosine+xray. Cosine won/made finals of like 6 oras ou tours in one season. One of the best builders around atm, got far on a lot of tours too. xray also has nice builds and solid playing. Both have tour exp, nice plays n builds. In fact i think they are the strongest buildin core this season, as they love to build with each other all the time, so lookin forward to see what they bring.
4th's ben gay + mencemeat. Altho ben might be a bit rusty atm, he's known for being a fantastic builder, in fact i remember last year he'd just get the best team matchups ever for our team, so definetly great at preparing for the matchas, just gonna come down to how his playing is looking rn. Jamvad's been active all year, had an amazing wcop(unfortunately his team couldn't keep up rip), and is ready to smash the tournament. Only thing that worries me is his activity and the ammount of time he can put into building, but if he's active, he can beat anyone on this list.
5th is Reymedy+Improbable. Rey had like the worst ou record last year, but he builds like 10 billion teams and has the support from a lot of ou players from bigs, as well as a lot of tour experience and good playing. Improbable had a nice wcop and seems to be ready to show what he's got. Not the strongest oras core but not the worst either.
6th is PDC+aim. PDC blew up this year, won wcop, got super far in stour, and just had a super solid spl record. Only thing is the lack of strong builders to get him the squads(unless tdk gives him teams again). Joey is honestly hard to rank because yeah he's solid at playing, but he pretty much had nothing going tournament-wise except for that "incident" against Improbable. Curious to see how he does.
7th is Ender+Abr. Although i really enjoy seeing endre playin, he's rusty with nothing happening since wcop, and his teams always seem to be quite the same thing almost every time, so not that hard to prepare against. Still great playing, tour exp, and solid builds tho. Abr bombed into the tournament scene after making finals of olt, going for quite a lot of money auction-wise!! Personally I really think olt's not a good tournament to judge people's playing skill, specially if u see the foxlord dude's teams(and the fact that he made like semifinals of the tournament). Olt had so much bad playing and so many shit teams(seriously, omg) that i really just refuse to think someone who makes it far into it is "good at pokémon". Despite this, abr beat people like cosine which really surprised me, so i definetly think he has potential. He's known for good building, too.
8th is Alexander+GeeMick. Wouldn't rank alex too high for the reasons stated above, also rly dislike the teams he's brought so far, and the fact that he repeats teams in general(which is just an autoloss on this tournament). geemick is a great dude, he has some fun builds, but idk how he'll do in a big tour like this, as the spl pressure might hurt him.
9th is reiku+steve. I haven't seen reiku and steve play ou at all for a while now. Although they both had a great wcop, i can't see them beating the top dogs of the tour. Another big thing is that they have pretty much no one on the team to help them in ORAS OU(at least i don't think they do), so they'll have to work it all alone.