EVs, natures, abilities, priority, secondary effects, damage rolls! Learning competitive Pokemon can be overwhelming. Pokemon Champions is the next phase of serious competitive play, and the free-to-play release on Switch and mobile will be used for competitive events going forward. While the core of Pokemon is meant to be approachable for all ages, competitive Pokemon has quite a bit going on under the hood for serious Pokemon masters. This will serve as a primer for getting into the serious competitive scene to take your Pokemon training to the next level.
Competitive Pokemon can be divided into two phases: Team building and battling. Team building is primarily defined by optimizing your Pokemon's base stats. Every Pokemon has six stats: HP, Attack, Defense, Special Attack, Special Defense, and Speed. By looking at a Pokemon’s base stats you can get an idea of how they are played. For example, Charizard’s two highest stats are Speed and Special Attack, while Annihilape has high HP and Attack. Generally speaking, this means Charizard is a fast special attacker and Annihilape is a bulky attacker. Of course, players have found many other uses for these Pokemon, but for simplicity we’re going to treat them as such.
So what’s the difference between an Attacker and Special Attacker? It largely comes down to its move pool. Moves that deal damage in Pokemon are split into two attack types: Physical and Special. Physical Attacks calculate the users attack stat against the opponent’s Defense Stat. Special attacks calculate the users special attack stat against the opponent's special defense. There is a lot of math that happens here, but the general rule of thumb is that Pokemon with a high attack should only be using physical attacks and a Pokemon with high special attack should only use special attacks. This is denoted by symbols next to the move name. Ideally when team building you’d want to have a mix of attackers and special attackers to cover your bases.
Pokemon Champions
Equally as important as your attackers and special attackers are support Pokemon. Support 'mons, as they are commonly called, can be used to set up your attackers or slow down your opponents. Support 'mons typically carry status moves such as Thunder Wave, Tailwind, or Rain Dance. However, there are hundreds of status moves to choose from. Finding the right support 'mon for your team can be tricky. You need to look beyond stats and check out their move pool and abilities. For example, Pelipper has middling stats, but its ability Drizzle allows it to set rain immediately when it enters the battlefield. Rain boosts the power of water type moves and decreases the power of fire type moves making it a serious threat. Additionally, it can learn tailwind which speeds up all Pokemon on your side of the field for five turns. A well-thought out Pelipper can be a devastating setup.
Another example is Amoonguss. Amoonguss may be slow, but it has incredible bulk making it tough to knock out. With moves like Rage Powder, Spore, and Pollen Puff, it can control the battlefield by redirecting attacks, putting threats to sleep, and healing Pokemon on its side of the field. For these reasons Amoonguss is widely considered one of the best support 'mons of all time.
Choosing the right support 'mon is difficult, but usually comes down to choosing the best Pokemon to empower your attackers. If Palafin is your attacker and Riachu is your special attacker, having Pelipper to set rain could be incredibly beneficial--all of Palafin’s water attacks will hit even harder and during rain, Thunder’s accuracy gets a bump from 70% to 100%.
Once you’ve selected your six Pokemon, it’s time to stat them out. In Pokemon Champions, each Pokemon has an additional 66 stat points that can be divided up among their six stats. The catch is that you can only invest a maximum of 32 points into one stat. Most of the time, Pokemon are trained to fit a very specific role: Sweepers, Bulky Offense, Tanks, Speed Control, to name a few, and their additional stats are used to reflect that. With Charizard's high speed and special attack it could make for a good sweeper, and therefore it makes sense to fully invest in its Special Attack and Speed in order to hit as hard and as fast as possible. Annihilape, on the other hand, is an attacker with bulk so it might make more sense to max out its attack and HP so it can live long enough to deal some decent damage.
Pokemon Champions
Additionally, you can further lean into a Pokemon’s stats by changing its nature. This increases the value in one stat while decreasing another. There are a lot of natures, but the most useful ones for most Pokemon are Adamant, Bold, Impish, Modest, Calm, Careful, Timid and Jolly. Why? Because all of these natures decrease a Pokemon’s Attack or Special attack, and since a Pokemon typically only uses one or the other, decreasing the other stat doesn’t really matter. Of course, there are hundreds of exceptions, but if you’re just starting out, these are the natures you should gravitate towards.
Finally, it’s time to give your Pokemon "Held Items." These are items that give your Pokemon an additional perk in battle. Leftovers slightly heals a Pokemon each turn, Choice Scarf increases a Pokemon’s speed but locks it into the first move it uses, safety goggles can protect a Pokemon from Spore and Rage Powder, and Covert Cloak protects a
kemon from an attack's secondary effects. Once again, items should synergize with a Pokemon’s playstyle. If you’ve built Charizard into a glass cannon, but its still not fast enough, a Choice Scarf can give it the edge. If you can’t afford Incinaroar getting put to sleep by a pesky Amoonguss then maybe it’s worth giving it Safety Goggles. You should never go into a battle unless every Pokemon is carrying an item. If you’re unsure what to give a specific Pokemon, you can never go wrong with a Sitrus Berry.
The key to team-building is experimentation and persistence. Tweak a Pokemon's stats, swap out moves, try different leads, change abilities, and so on. There are also plenty of resources online to help with this. Pikalytics shows how specific Pokemon are commonly trained, LabMaus collates team information from different tournaments around the world, and Showdown is a battle simulator lets you quickly train and battle Pokemon to test your team compositions. When I build a team I refer to all three of these websites to varying degrees.
After you've built a team, it’s time to battle. The most common format for competitive play are double battles. Champions does have single battles, but double battles tend to be the standard because there are more variables at play. At the start of a battle you can pick four of your six Pokemon to take into battle based on your opponent's team. Your opponent won’t know which four you chose and you won't know theirs. Knock out all four of your opponent's Pokemon and you win.
Pokemon Champions
Let's start with weaknesses and resistances. Chances are if you've played Pokemon at all you know about the rock-paper-scissors style gameplay. Grass beats water, water beats fire, and fire beats grass. There are 18-types in total and each has their own weaknesses and resistances. Back in my day you needed to lock that type chart in your dome, but now, most modern Pokemon games tell you which moves are super effective and which are not very effective. A super effective move deals twice as much damage and a not very effective move deals roughly half damage. The thing is, Pokemon has dual-type 'mons and their extra types are also factored into their weaknesses and resistances. For example, Gyrados is Flying and Water so that means Electric attacks are 4x super effective and grass attacks deal standard damage. Garchomp is Ground and Dragon which means it has 2x weakness to Dragon and Fairy and a whopping 4x weakness to Ice. This isn’t all bad, though, because even though Garchomp may have picked up a 4x weakness, it’s immune to Electric thanks to its Ground typing.
Thankfully, Pokemon Champions denotes if a move is 2x effective or 4x effective with its wording: Super Effective and Extremely Effective. It does the same for resistances as well, so you don’t keep all of this in your head. However you still need to know what your Pokemon are weak to, especially if any of them have a 4x weakness. Because Super Effective attacks can be so devastating, it’s usually a good idea to have two 'mons on the field that can cover for each other's weaknesses. If your Gyrados is being threatened by a Raichu, threaten the Raichu with your Garchomp.
In most cases, the Pokemon with the fastest speed stat will attack first. However, each move falls into a priority bracket. Moves like Protect, Fake out, and Bullet Punch fall into a higher priority bracket than Flamethrower or Shadow Ball. This means that even a slow Pokemon can act first if the selected move has high priority. Protect and Helping Hand will almost always go first regardless of their user’s speed.
Pokemon Champions
Fake-Out is an incredibly common move in competitive play because if it’s used on the first turn it will cause the opposing Pokemon to flinch. Since Fake-Out has a higher priority than most moves, it can flinch a Pokemon right out of the gate. Of course, there are ways to play around this. Protect has higher priority; or, if a Pokemon has a Covert Cloak, the flinch effect won't occur. You could also just switch to a Ghost Pokemon to avoid the Fake-Out altogether since Normal attacks don't affect Ghost types.
This is where Pokemon battles start to get really complicated. There are so many mechanics and factors at play in every match and knowing how things resolve is incredibly important. For example, some Pokemon like Whimsacott have an ability called Prankster. This gives priority to status moves like Taunt, Encore, Thunder Wave, and other similar moves. However, if a Pokemon with Prankster targets a Dark-type Pokemon, it won't have any effect because Dark-type Pokemon are immune to Prankster. There are dozens of minor interactions like these that you can only learn through experience.
But let's take a step back. What are some of the most common battle mechanics in competitive play? Fake-Out has already been mentioned, but you can guarantee any competitive player with a bit of experience will have a Fake-Out user or two. Tailwind is another popular move that increases the speed of Pokemon on your side of the field. If used correctly, a slow and bulky threat can become a fast and bulky threat which is one of the scariest Pokemon to square up against. There are ways to outmaneuver Tailwind, though. You can set up your own Tailwind, and then use Taunt, a move that prevents Pokemon from using status moves. Or you can use Trick Room which allows the slowest Pokemon on the field to attack first.
Pokemon Champions
Speaking of Trick Room, that's another common strategy deployed in competitive Pokemon. For five turns, the slowest Pokemon on the field attack first. The catch is that Trick Room is a low priority move meaning it almost always goes last. The gist is to bring a bunch of slow, bulky, and strong Pokemon out with the hopes of setting up Trick Room. Once again, Taunt can prevent a Trick Room user from triggering, or you can reverse it by using your own.
The key to winning is finding a team that synergizes well together. Does your team have an answer to common threats? Is there a good balance of physical attackers, special attackers, and support Pokemon? Do your support Pokemon have the tools to empower your attackers? If Champions is your first foray into competitive Pokemon I highly recommend building a team around weather. Sun and Rain can be incredibly powerful if used correctly, and if your opponent isn’t able to change or reset the weather, they may not have any answers.
Sun and Rain are two sides of the same coin. Sun increases fire’s attack power and decreases water. Rain does the opposite. Obviously your fire and water damage dealers could be really deadly under the right circumstances, but there’s more Pokemon that can benefit from weather. For example, let’s take Sun. Torkoal is one of the best sun setters because of his Drought ability that sets Sun automatically. Now, the obvious Pokemon to take along with Torkoal would be a powerful fire Pokemon with high attack or special attack stats. However, there are a lot of grass Pokemon that also benefit from the sun. For example, Venusaur could make for a powerful partner. Why? Because one of its best moves, Solar Beam, does not need to charge a turn under Sun. Additionally, Venasaur has an ability called Chlorophyll which boosts its speed stat under harsh sun. This means you have a fast grass 'mon to cover Torkoal’s water weakness thanks to Solar Beam.
I’d also encourage you to try out some of your favorite Pokemon and build teams around them. Sure they may not be the most efficient team, but even uncommon picks have an advantage: Your opponent may not know how to play around them. I guarantee you competitive players will know how to deal with a Pelipper on day one, but maybe not a Politoed that’s also rocking the Drizzle ability. And that’s the beauty of competitive Pokemon. There’s so much creative expression when it comes to battling and team-building that the skill ceiling is nearly non-existent. Even when two teams look identical, there are so many ways they can be played.
Pokemon Champions is coming to Switch, iOS, and Android on April 8.
Source
Making A Monster Team
Competitive Pokemon can be divided into two phases: Team building and battling. Team building is primarily defined by optimizing your Pokemon's base stats. Every Pokemon has six stats: HP, Attack, Defense, Special Attack, Special Defense, and Speed. By looking at a Pokemon’s base stats you can get an idea of how they are played. For example, Charizard’s two highest stats are Speed and Special Attack, while Annihilape has high HP and Attack. Generally speaking, this means Charizard is a fast special attacker and Annihilape is a bulky attacker. Of course, players have found many other uses for these Pokemon, but for simplicity we’re going to treat them as such.
So what’s the difference between an Attacker and Special Attacker? It largely comes down to its move pool. Moves that deal damage in Pokemon are split into two attack types: Physical and Special. Physical Attacks calculate the users attack stat against the opponent’s Defense Stat. Special attacks calculate the users special attack stat against the opponent's special defense. There is a lot of math that happens here, but the general rule of thumb is that Pokemon with a high attack should only be using physical attacks and a Pokemon with high special attack should only use special attacks. This is denoted by symbols next to the move name. Ideally when team building you’d want to have a mix of attackers and special attackers to cover your bases.
Pokemon Champions
Equally as important as your attackers and special attackers are support Pokemon. Support 'mons, as they are commonly called, can be used to set up your attackers or slow down your opponents. Support 'mons typically carry status moves such as Thunder Wave, Tailwind, or Rain Dance. However, there are hundreds of status moves to choose from. Finding the right support 'mon for your team can be tricky. You need to look beyond stats and check out their move pool and abilities. For example, Pelipper has middling stats, but its ability Drizzle allows it to set rain immediately when it enters the battlefield. Rain boosts the power of water type moves and decreases the power of fire type moves making it a serious threat. Additionally, it can learn tailwind which speeds up all Pokemon on your side of the field for five turns. A well-thought out Pelipper can be a devastating setup.
Another example is Amoonguss. Amoonguss may be slow, but it has incredible bulk making it tough to knock out. With moves like Rage Powder, Spore, and Pollen Puff, it can control the battlefield by redirecting attacks, putting threats to sleep, and healing Pokemon on its side of the field. For these reasons Amoonguss is widely considered one of the best support 'mons of all time.
Choosing the right support 'mon is difficult, but usually comes down to choosing the best Pokemon to empower your attackers. If Palafin is your attacker and Riachu is your special attacker, having Pelipper to set rain could be incredibly beneficial--all of Palafin’s water attacks will hit even harder and during rain, Thunder’s accuracy gets a bump from 70% to 100%.
Optimizing Your Stats
Once you’ve selected your six Pokemon, it’s time to stat them out. In Pokemon Champions, each Pokemon has an additional 66 stat points that can be divided up among their six stats. The catch is that you can only invest a maximum of 32 points into one stat. Most of the time, Pokemon are trained to fit a very specific role: Sweepers, Bulky Offense, Tanks, Speed Control, to name a few, and their additional stats are used to reflect that. With Charizard's high speed and special attack it could make for a good sweeper, and therefore it makes sense to fully invest in its Special Attack and Speed in order to hit as hard and as fast as possible. Annihilape, on the other hand, is an attacker with bulk so it might make more sense to max out its attack and HP so it can live long enough to deal some decent damage.
Pokemon Champions
Additionally, you can further lean into a Pokemon’s stats by changing its nature. This increases the value in one stat while decreasing another. There are a lot of natures, but the most useful ones for most Pokemon are Adamant, Bold, Impish, Modest, Calm, Careful, Timid and Jolly. Why? Because all of these natures decrease a Pokemon’s Attack or Special attack, and since a Pokemon typically only uses one or the other, decreasing the other stat doesn’t really matter. Of course, there are hundreds of exceptions, but if you’re just starting out, these are the natures you should gravitate towards.
Finally, it’s time to give your Pokemon "Held Items." These are items that give your Pokemon an additional perk in battle. Leftovers slightly heals a Pokemon each turn, Choice Scarf increases a Pokemon’s speed but locks it into the first move it uses, safety goggles can protect a Pokemon from Spore and Rage Powder, and Covert Cloak protects a
kemon from an attack's secondary effects. Once again, items should synergize with a Pokemon’s playstyle. If you’ve built Charizard into a glass cannon, but its still not fast enough, a Choice Scarf can give it the edge. If you can’t afford Incinaroar getting put to sleep by a pesky Amoonguss then maybe it’s worth giving it Safety Goggles. You should never go into a battle unless every Pokemon is carrying an item. If you’re unsure what to give a specific Pokemon, you can never go wrong with a Sitrus Berry.The key to team-building is experimentation and persistence. Tweak a Pokemon's stats, swap out moves, try different leads, change abilities, and so on. There are also plenty of resources online to help with this. Pikalytics shows how specific Pokemon are commonly trained, LabMaus collates team information from different tournaments around the world, and Showdown is a battle simulator lets you quickly train and battle Pokemon to test your team compositions. When I build a team I refer to all three of these websites to varying degrees.
Meet On The Field Of Battle
After you've built a team, it’s time to battle. The most common format for competitive play are double battles. Champions does have single battles, but double battles tend to be the standard because there are more variables at play. At the start of a battle you can pick four of your six Pokemon to take into battle based on your opponent's team. Your opponent won’t know which four you chose and you won't know theirs. Knock out all four of your opponent's Pokemon and you win.
Pokemon Champions
Let's start with weaknesses and resistances. Chances are if you've played Pokemon at all you know about the rock-paper-scissors style gameplay. Grass beats water, water beats fire, and fire beats grass. There are 18-types in total and each has their own weaknesses and resistances. Back in my day you needed to lock that type chart in your dome, but now, most modern Pokemon games tell you which moves are super effective and which are not very effective. A super effective move deals twice as much damage and a not very effective move deals roughly half damage. The thing is, Pokemon has dual-type 'mons and their extra types are also factored into their weaknesses and resistances. For example, Gyrados is Flying and Water so that means Electric attacks are 4x super effective and grass attacks deal standard damage. Garchomp is Ground and Dragon which means it has 2x weakness to Dragon and Fairy and a whopping 4x weakness to Ice. This isn’t all bad, though, because even though Garchomp may have picked up a 4x weakness, it’s immune to Electric thanks to its Ground typing.
Thankfully, Pokemon Champions denotes if a move is 2x effective or 4x effective with its wording: Super Effective and Extremely Effective. It does the same for resistances as well, so you don’t keep all of this in your head. However you still need to know what your Pokemon are weak to, especially if any of them have a 4x weakness. Because Super Effective attacks can be so devastating, it’s usually a good idea to have two 'mons on the field that can cover for each other's weaknesses. If your Gyrados is being threatened by a Raichu, threaten the Raichu with your Garchomp.
In most cases, the Pokemon with the fastest speed stat will attack first. However, each move falls into a priority bracket. Moves like Protect, Fake out, and Bullet Punch fall into a higher priority bracket than Flamethrower or Shadow Ball. This means that even a slow Pokemon can act first if the selected move has high priority. Protect and Helping Hand will almost always go first regardless of their user’s speed.
Pokemon Champions
Fake-Out is an incredibly common move in competitive play because if it’s used on the first turn it will cause the opposing Pokemon to flinch. Since Fake-Out has a higher priority than most moves, it can flinch a Pokemon right out of the gate. Of course, there are ways to play around this. Protect has higher priority; or, if a Pokemon has a Covert Cloak, the flinch effect won't occur. You could also just switch to a Ghost Pokemon to avoid the Fake-Out altogether since Normal attacks don't affect Ghost types.
Taking It To The Next Level
This is where Pokemon battles start to get really complicated. There are so many mechanics and factors at play in every match and knowing how things resolve is incredibly important. For example, some Pokemon like Whimsacott have an ability called Prankster. This gives priority to status moves like Taunt, Encore, Thunder Wave, and other similar moves. However, if a Pokemon with Prankster targets a Dark-type Pokemon, it won't have any effect because Dark-type Pokemon are immune to Prankster. There are dozens of minor interactions like these that you can only learn through experience.
But let's take a step back. What are some of the most common battle mechanics in competitive play? Fake-Out has already been mentioned, but you can guarantee any competitive player with a bit of experience will have a Fake-Out user or two. Tailwind is another popular move that increases the speed of Pokemon on your side of the field. If used correctly, a slow and bulky threat can become a fast and bulky threat which is one of the scariest Pokemon to square up against. There are ways to outmaneuver Tailwind, though. You can set up your own Tailwind, and then use Taunt, a move that prevents Pokemon from using status moves. Or you can use Trick Room which allows the slowest Pokemon on the field to attack first.
Pokemon Champions
Speaking of Trick Room, that's another common strategy deployed in competitive Pokemon. For five turns, the slowest Pokemon on the field attack first. The catch is that Trick Room is a low priority move meaning it almost always goes last. The gist is to bring a bunch of slow, bulky, and strong Pokemon out with the hopes of setting up Trick Room. Once again, Taunt can prevent a Trick Room user from triggering, or you can reverse it by using your own.
The key to winning is finding a team that synergizes well together. Does your team have an answer to common threats? Is there a good balance of physical attackers, special attackers, and support Pokemon? Do your support Pokemon have the tools to empower your attackers? If Champions is your first foray into competitive Pokemon I highly recommend building a team around weather. Sun and Rain can be incredibly powerful if used correctly, and if your opponent isn’t able to change or reset the weather, they may not have any answers.
Sun and Rain are two sides of the same coin. Sun increases fire’s attack power and decreases water. Rain does the opposite. Obviously your fire and water damage dealers could be really deadly under the right circumstances, but there’s more Pokemon that can benefit from weather. For example, let’s take Sun. Torkoal is one of the best sun setters because of his Drought ability that sets Sun automatically. Now, the obvious Pokemon to take along with Torkoal would be a powerful fire Pokemon with high attack or special attack stats. However, there are a lot of grass Pokemon that also benefit from the sun. For example, Venusaur could make for a powerful partner. Why? Because one of its best moves, Solar Beam, does not need to charge a turn under Sun. Additionally, Venasaur has an ability called Chlorophyll which boosts its speed stat under harsh sun. This means you have a fast grass 'mon to cover Torkoal’s water weakness thanks to Solar Beam.
I’d also encourage you to try out some of your favorite Pokemon and build teams around them. Sure they may not be the most efficient team, but even uncommon picks have an advantage: Your opponent may not know how to play around them. I guarantee you competitive players will know how to deal with a Pelipper on day one, but maybe not a Politoed that’s also rocking the Drizzle ability. And that’s the beauty of competitive Pokemon. There’s so much creative expression when it comes to battling and team-building that the skill ceiling is nearly non-existent. Even when two teams look identical, there are so many ways they can be played.
Pokemon Champions is coming to Switch, iOS, and Android on April 8.
Source