Pokémon Champions wants to be an entry point for people new to the series’ complicated competitive scene. But if the first few days have proved anything, it’s that some of the same old strategies have continued to dominate, even in the new Switch battle sim.
The game’s Battle Data menu is still gathering information before it publishes hard numbers, but it’s already ranking Pokémon by how many players are using them in online battles. Surprising no one, Incineroar, the fire/dark competitive beast that debuted in Sun and Moon, is at the top of the list for double battles. That checks out considering the monster was in more than half of competitors’ teams during the game’s first tournament.
The competition took place on April 8, the same day Champions launched on Switch. With very little time to prepare, over 500 players gathered in the Champions Hub Discord to take part in the tournament. It included a $500 prize pool, with the first-place winner gamblingvgc92 taking home $120 as the grand prize.
Incineroar ended up at the top of the tournament’s usage ranking with a whopping 53.76 percent of teams using the wrestling tiger. Sneasler ranked second, but its pick rate was significantly lower than Incineroar’s, coming in at 36.84 percent. Notably, its win rate was higher than Incineroar’s, with Sneasler teams winning 51.38 percent of matches compared to Incineroar’s 49.89 percent. The top ten most-used Pokémon in the tournament are as follows:
- Incineroar
- Sneasler
- Sinistcha
- Garchomp
- Basculegion
- Kingambit
- Pelipper
- Whimsicott
- Archaludon
- Tyranitar
Anyone who’s been playing Champions online will recognize most of these names, as they’re popping up in just about every match in double battles. Though the in-game ranking has a little bit of variation, there’s a lot of overlap between the most-used Pokémon in the game’s first tournament and the most-used online overall:
- Incineroar
- Sneasler
- Garchomp
- Kingambit
- Sinistcha
- Whimsicott
- Charizard
- Basculegion
- Floette
- Tyranitar
How has Incineroar maintained competitive dominance after over a decade? It has a ton of support options that make it easily fit into just about any team composition. Its Intimidate ability lowers enemy attack stats, it can use Fake Out to stall out opponents, and Parting Shot allows it to further weaken opponents and then retreat to safety while you freely swap to a different Pokémon.
Not that Incineroar needs to run away. It can handle itself just fine in a full-on fight. But it also remains one of the best choices for pretty much all teams. As long as all of those things remain true, we will likely see the fire cat heavily represented in every Champions tournament.
I’m almost surprised The Pokémon Company didn’t decide to omit Incineroar in the first season just to shake things up in the meta, but perhaps it’s just too much of a competitive staple to not be in the roster right out of the gate. Champions launched with several notable bugs, including one that trapped Pokémon in limbo while transferring them from the Home storage app to the battle sim.
The Pokémon Company put out a statement apologizing for the messy launch, and has already held one maintenance period to fix some known issues.