Pokémon Champions - releasing April 8, 2026

[Karxrida]

So I booted Champions in handheld mode and the resolution seemed to be fine in that context, at least on Switch 2. I don't know what resolution the game is actually running in, but it definitely doesn't feel like it's being boosted while docked.

Also noticed that any mons you deposit via Home are automatically set to level 50. I grabbed a Gyarados from SV that was below level 40 and it was still good to go.

 

[MC Squared]

So I booted Champions in handheld mode and the resolution seemed to be fine in that context, at least on Switch 2. I don't know what resolution the game is actually running in, but it definitely doesn't feel like it's being boosted while docked.

Also noticed that any mons you deposit via Home are automatically set to level 50. I grabbed a Gyarados from SV was below level 40 and it was still good to go.

On Switch 2 it's set to 1080p 30 fps, not 60 fps as advertised. On Switch 1 it's 720p 30 fps

 

[Sulfurian]

Ugh the 3v3s are so cringe. You either face immediate setup cringe and lose the first round, or get hit by yawn spam and OP megas lol

 

[Antihaxxer]

How do ranks work in 3V3 ou 4V4 ? When do you reach Masters/Champions ?

 

[ant4456]

How do ranks work in 3V3 ou 4V4 ? When do you reach Masters/Champions ?

p much what i understand is

pokeball: tutorial tier when you lose you will fight a bot free win
great ball: if you lose twice you get a bot game, a bit harder
ultra ball: no bot games
master ball: has the elo ladder, champion rank doesnt seem to be in the game? i might be wrong

my biggest hopes rn are besides the qol/graphics stuff:

Replay function
Bo3 Ladder
And for the love of god please give ladder options between seasons, they don't have to keep every metagame forever not even Showdown rlly does that, but it will be sad if they do what they have always done on cart and "we are forcing Kyogre Restricted meta on you now, fuck you"

these things would bring it much more on par experience wise, but being a japanese game and having played japanese competitive games besides pokemon, if japan doesn't complain they won't care

most of the things the west doesn't like about the competitive Pokemon experience, Japan likes

.. I think I have softlocked the game

I forfeited and the opponent seemingly AFK'd, and the game has been "Communicating..." for like, 3 minutes

I don't think they programmed a game end state for if someone forfeits and their opponent AFK forfeits LMFAOOOOO

 

[Supreme Dirt]

.. I think I have softlocked the game

I forfeited and the opponent seemingly AFK'd, and the game has been "Communicating..." for like, 3 minutes

I don't think they programmed a game end state for if someone forfeits and their opponent AFK forfeits LMFAOOOOO

this happened to me the other day, i think i forfeit on the party screen and it just stayed there for ages, i restarted the game and got a message of "your last game finished unexpectedly".

 

[Tomgetic]

.. I think I have softlocked the game

I forfeited and the opponent seemingly AFK'd, and the game has been "Communicating..." for like, 3 minutes

I don't think they programmed a game end state for if someone forfeits and their opponent AFK forfeits LMFAOOOOO

this happened to me the other day, i think i forfeit on the party screen and it just stayed there for ages, i restarted the game and got a message of "your last game finished unexpectedly".

Did you lose rank progress, or ELO if you are in master ball?

 

[ant4456]

Did you lose rank progress, or ELO if you are in master ball?

I don't think it did, when I reopened the game it said it ended unexpectedly

 

[Supreme Dirt]

Did you lose rank progress, or ELO if you are in master ball?

i did not, no. rating stayed the same.

 

[Mad Ram]

Wait, Aerodactyl finally has a decent stab that works with Tough Claws? Why didn't anyone tell me? Yeah, it's Dual Wingbeat, but it's still an effective 104 BP before stab, and it breaks sashes, sturdy, and occasional substitutes. Sure, it doesn't have a good Rock contact stab, but baby steps.

 

[CynicalGiant]

Wait, Aerodactyl finally has a decent stab that works with Tough Claws? Why didn't anyone tell me? Yeah, it's Dual Wingbeat, but it's still an effective 104 BP before stab, and it breaks sashes, sturdy, and occasional substitutes. Sure, it doesn't have a good Rock contact stab, but baby steps.

both stabs aero runs being 90% accurate is so funny

 

[Magcargo]

Got to master rank in both 3v3 & 4v4. I must say - I really like this game!

Both the VGC & 3v3 ladders feel like they are at a nice power level where there are clear strong options, but nothing feels mandatory quite yet. I've seen a lot of cool variety in both the BSS and VGC ladders. There are a few cheesers I am not too keen on seeing like Yawn spammers, Espathra, or Quick Claw / Bright Powder goobers (WHY did Gamefreak think these were good items to include in the limited item dex????). At the very least cheese across the board has been nerfed significantly across the board.

Battles aren't as snappy as showdown but significantly snappier than SV. Teambuilding is also a lot easier in this game because of the sliders + ease of changing out moves. Accumulating VP imo is quite trivial too once you build your first team. Though I am not a fan of how it is more difficult to steal teams.

I think the graphics look fine enough personally but I think they should release switch 2 version with 60 FPs mode later on.

 

[mattgcn]

I know the giant pile of movelearns with any new game can be kind of overwhelming so I did my big comb-through and here's the results. Yes I know other people put subsets of these lists up already but I wanted to be thorough in a very particular way:

The table itself is linked in my sig (on the roster tab), and then plus there is a bunch of plaintext lists of mons/learns that people can do with what they will. I thought a particularly useful tab was marking what moves gained in PLZA were actually kept, because some things got a lot of fresh tools in there. Additionally, I have ludicrously exhaustive lists of "losses" that consider a mon's entire history, on the Historical Learnlists tab.

Hope this can be of some use to you all!

 

[dd777]

Might have missed this, but they changed the timer win condition. Now it is a draw regardless of mons? I had 3 to 2 mons. God thats awful.

 

[ant4456]

Got to master rank in both 3v3 & 4v4. I must say - I really like this game!

Both the VGC & 3v3 ladders feel like they are at a nice power level where there are clear strong options, but nothing feels mandatory quite yet. I've seen a lot of cool variety in both the BSS and VGC ladders. There are a few cheesers I am not too keen on seeing like Yawn spammers, Espathra, or Quick Claw / Bright Powder goobers (WHY did Gamefreak think these were good items to include in the limited item dex????). At the very least cheese across the board has been nerfed significantly across the board.

Battles aren't as snappy as showdown but significantly snappier than SV. Teambuilding is also a lot easier in this game because of the sliders + ease of changing out moves. Accumulating VP imo is quite trivial too once you build your first team. Though I am not a fan of how it is more difficult to steal teams.

I think the graphics look fine enough personally but I think they should release switch 2 version with 60 FPs mode later on.

On those last two paragraphs, this morning after being salty with RNG where the last turns of a game felt so slow considering I was put in the backfoot, I decided to ladder on Showdown for a bit.

And like, it was fast, yes. But it also felt kinda... soulless? Idk. No mark against Showdown, but as a core it feels soulless in terms of funness. I went back to laddering on Champions and when I'm winning its fucking awesome I get to see fun animations and have the sound effects etc. as my play plays out.

I think the speed being slower can suck when you feel like you're already at a losing battle esp. when it's not your fault, but in other situations it's IMO much better.

I do think some things should be changed though, Perish Song procs take forever to scroll through.

I came here to post abt smth else actually though:

Why does VP exist?

And I mean, seriously. Not because it's an issue. To be blunt: VP is quite literally not an issue at all, especially if you own literally any single one Switch game- I have not gone the full F2P experience, so if it is a problem for F2P please let me know, I do recruit some mons using VP but like its a 80-20 split of my mons vs recruits-

Genuinely, if it is also fine for F2P, all it does is give the game a bad rep. Because you literally get so much.

I spend 5K every other day. I bought all the music tracks. At least 15k on other vanity items. Like 30 items. Trained like 60 Pokemon. And I have 33k right now.

According to my gameplay stats, I have "46,900 VP Spent in Shops", which to be clear, does not include training.

Now, you might first think, that's just because it's a new game! They're love-bombing new players! Well, it weekly quests are as you'd expect, no. Not only do you get 1k every 3 wins (basically, maybe more like 950 or smth) on Ranked, you get around 10k in Weekly Missions which are all shit like "Get 3 critical hits" or "Use 10 extremelyeffective attacks"

There are some that are type based, so there you go, maybe you don't have that type! You can reroll a mission objective 5 times.

This is on top of the Daily missions which, if you play 1 Ranked Battle and recruit a Pokemon (including trials, which is literally free and you can immediately ditch the Pokemon, no worries about box space) you get 500VP just from that.

So what is the point, at least, of having this for training?

There is a very Nintendo Quality to this decision because its the kind of thing where it seems like they copied a popular trend from worse games, which makes people assume the worst case scenario, when in actuality it's fine, at least in my experience. I can effectively never run out of VP unless I purposefully bought literally everything, and not go "Oh I want this berry, let me buy it". You don't need the fucking Oran Berry lmao, and if you do just buy it then.

I think the worst case scenario is over time and when they drop new things it's harder, but right now it feels like a useless system that's just bait to piss people off.

The amount of people I've seen that say so'uch shit like

-The game requires Nintendo Switch Online (it doesn't)

-The Mega Stones in the battle pass are exclusive (they aren't)

-You can buy VP or its super limited designed to rate limit you (it isn't in my experience, and you can't buy it

Is crazy. There is one F2P thing, which I will shit on, which is having mons locked to ZA.

And that is literally the status quo of Pokemon, unfortunately, and I myself was able to get a casual friend to trade me a Floette because I wanted to use it. Literally everything about Champions is a significant upgrade from SV as a competitive player, but that isn't the story because they've

Marketed it like shit
Didn't communicate what the launch would actually be like
Rushed the game, clearly
And added a bunch of mobile game features and then subsequently made them not really matter but they still exist to be made fun of

 

[Worldie]

The simple answer is that this is a F2P game and VPs exist as artificial barrier to get people to buy the games.

Like all "gachas", you do get a initial flood of VPs, but those actually do exhaust relatively quickly if you have to constantly recruit pokemon once you're out of the initial freebies.

They are a artificial gate that puts you in the same position most mobile games do, you "can" play the game purely free, but it's going to be much better if you pay.
The difference is, the "pay" aspect is not in Champions. The Pay aspect is "buy the actual pokemon games".

The microtransactions in Champions are intentionally bad because they aren't really the point, the artificial walls exist just so you don't get to just ignore buying pokemon games for the next decade if you want to play competitively.
(or, you do get to ignore buying them, but have to buy the premium BP to have the box slots and resources, which if you actually sum it up, 50€ish per year is basically equivalent to buying 2 mainline games and their DLCs in the same generational lifespan)

This game is 100% playable as pure F2P and that's a big plus, but man I don't want to imagine how tedious it is for a pure F2P (aka, literally only has Champions, no Home subscription and no Pokemon games other than Go) to keep more than 1-2 competitively viable teams around.

 

[ant4456]

The simple answer is that this is a F2P game and VPs exist as artificial barrier to get people to buy the games.

Like all "gachas", you do get a initial flood of VPs, but those actually do exhaust relatively quickly if you have to constantly recruit pokemon once you're out of the initial freebies.

They are a artificial gate that puts you in the same position most mobile games do, you "can" play the game purely free, but it's going to be much better if you pay.
The difference is, the "pay" aspect is not in Champions. The Pay aspect is "buy the actual pokemon games".

The microtransactions in Champions are intentionally bad because they aren't really the point, the artificial walls exist just so you don't get to just ignore buying pokemon games for the next decade if you want to play competitively.
(or, you do get to ignore buying them, but have to buy the premium BP to have the box slots and resources, which if you actually sum it up, 50€ish per year is basically equivalent to buying 2 mainline games and their DLCs in the same generational lifespan)

This game is 100% playable as pure F2P and that's a big plus, but man I don't want to imagine how tedious it is for a pure F2P (aka, literally only has Champions, no Home subscription and no Pokemon games other than Go) to keep more than 1-2 competitively viable teams around.

i think a big boon though is trading exists

i think the biggest sin is floette but idt thats the end of the world rn. ive been trying a mega gardevoir team and you have to build it slightly differently to a floette team but honestly it isnt that much worse than floette, and in some ways is a sidegrade. you can run encore which lets you lock things like kingambit into sucker, mons like talonflame or aerodactyl into tailwind, fake out incin etc., great disruption

i think when you open up f2p to the world of trading and Generous Donations, bc lets be honest in the modern games it takes like 3 minutes to catch a fully evolved competitively relevant Pokemon, it becomes a lot easier, and that is a genuine advantage to champions f2p over any gacha game

your friend playing genshin cant get a copy of their scrimblo and give you one, yknow?

i agree that the home space would be a big issue because that would make it a real stressor, but i think if you really want to do it it wont be that hard tbh.

 

[Sulfurian]

On those last two paragraphs, this morning after being salty with RNG where the last turns of a game felt so slow considering I was put in the backfoot, I decided to ladder on Showdown for a bit.

And like, it was fast, yes. But it also felt kinda... soulless? Idk. No mark against Showdown, but as a core it feels soulless in terms of funness. I went back to laddering on Champions and when I'm winning its fucking awesome I get to see fun animations and have the sound effects etc. as my play plays out.

I think the speed being slower can suck when you feel like you're already at a losing battle esp. when it's not your fault, but in other situations it's IMO much better.

I do think some things should be changed though, Perish Song procs take forever to scroll through.

I came here to post abt smth else actually though:

Why does VP exist?

And I mean, seriously. Not because it's an issue. To be blunt: VP is quite literally not an issue at all, especially if you own literally any single one Switch game- I have not gone the full F2P experience, so if it is a problem for F2P please let me know, I do recruit some mons using VP but like its a 80-20 split of my mons vs recruits-

Genuinely, if it is also fine for F2P, all it does is give the game a bad rep. Because you literally get so much.

I spend 5K every other day. I bought all the music tracks. At least 15k on other vanity items. Like 30 items. Trained like 60 Pokemon. And I have 33k right now.

According to my gameplay stats, I have "46,900 VP Spent in Shops", which to be clear, does not include training.

Now, you might first think, that's just because it's a new game! They're love-bombing new players! Well, it weekly quests are as you'd expect, no. Not only do you get 1k every 3 wins (basically, maybe more like 950 or smth) on Ranked, you get around 10k in Weekly Missions which are all shit like "Get 3 critical hits" or "Use 10 extremelyeffective attacks"

There are some that are type based, so there you go, maybe you don't have that type! You can reroll a mission objective 5 times.

This is on top of the Daily missions which, if you play 1 Ranked Battle and recruit a Pokemon (including trials, which is literally free and you can immediately ditch the Pokemon, no worries about box space) you get 500VP just from that.

So what is the point, at least, of having this for training?

There is a very Nintendo Quality to this decision because its the kind of thing where it seems like they copied a popular trend from worse games, which makes people assume the worst case scenario, when in actuality it's fine, at least in my experience. I can effectively never run out of VP unless I purposefully bought literally everything, and not go "Oh I want this berry, let me buy it". You don't need the fucking Oran Berry lmao, and if you do just buy it then.

I think the worst case scenario is over time and when they drop new things it's harder, but right now it feels like a useless system that's just bait to piss people off.

The amount of people I've seen that say so'uch shit like

-The game requires Nintendo Switch Online (it doesn't)

-The Mega Stones in the battle pass are exclusive (they aren't)

-You can buy VP or its super limited designed to rate limit you (it isn't in my experience, and you can't buy it

Is crazy. There is one F2P thing, which I will shit on, which is having mons locked to ZA.

And that is literally the status quo of Pokemon, unfortunately, and I myself was able to get a casual friend to trade me a Floette because I wanted to use it. Literally everything about Champions is a significant upgrade from SV as a competitive player, but that isn't the story because they've

Marketed it like shit
Didn't communicate what the launch would actually be like
Rushed the game, clearly
And added a bunch of mobile game features and then subsequently made them not really matter but they still exist to be made fun of

As someone who played cart most of my life, I will take already having an army of Pokemon ready as an advantage, then something like "you need to recruit a Pokemon using VP in order to transfer that Pokemon from home." Like yeah, the VP systems feel a little worthless once you have all the items you need, like I most likely will never buy a Glalie Mega Stone lol. Bottom line I hope they keep VP being kinda meh, especially if we also need to buy every Z crystal with VP, or if they bring all the gems back besides normal gem. But once you got the VP and buy them you're good for all seasons.

 

[CynicalGiant]

random vgc players on twitter reminded me that when rillaboom is back, eternal floette can help it block intimidate because of flower veil, lol

I wish meteor beam was on par with electro shot, fires off in 1 turn in sand, but if they did it then you could run the bridge in sand which is probably why its not on par with electro shot lol

 

[Samtendo09]

I wish meteor beam was on par with electro shot, fires off in 1 turn in sand, but if they did it then you could run the bridge in sand which is probably why its not on par with electro shot lol

It’s more of a case of intentional power creep regarding signature moves than Meteor Beam being “bad”. That move is considered as a solid move in it’s own right due to +1 SpA and high 120 Base Power, which synergize well with Power Herb… It is just that special attacking Rock-type Pokémon, or special attackers that would appreciate Rock coverage, are hard to come by.

If Meteor Beam is upgraded to be like Electro Shot and Archaludon kept Meteor Beam, then yeah it’ll just buff Archaludon more than anything else.

 

[Worldie]

i think the biggest sin is floette

I expect / hope that this is a similar case to how some of the megastones are handled in ZA, where they're "temporary exclusives" and will be available to everyone by the time the actual competitive scene start.

At least I do hope so.

But then again, while you can arguably say that it is "p2w", in the end by that definition Pokemon VGC has always been "p2w" because if you didn't own the last entry of the series you were always going to be behind, either due to lack of certain pokemon, or certain features (move tutors / TRs / QoL features), or literally not being able to play at all (before they switched to DLC, you could not play from XY or Sun/Moon once the VGC shifted to ORAS/USUM).
Gen 9 expecially even required you to own the side-games on top of the actual main games (and you needed to own SwSh to have access to Calyrex) so it was even worse than it usually has been.
So I don't consider "you need to own the last Pokemon game or you're at disadvantage" as P2W but rather "nothing changed".

At least, they *completely* killed any need to ever use hacking or own multiple versions of a game / spam reset save files.
Which on its own is already a massive step up. We take the Ws we can get.

It’s more of a case of intentional power creep regarding signature moves than Meteor Beam being “bad”. That move is considered as a solid move in it’s own right due to +1 SpA and high 120 Base Power, which synergize well with Power Herb… It is just that special attacking Rock-type Pokémon, or special attackers that would appreciate Rock coverage, are hard to come by.

If Meteor Beam is upgraded to be like Electro Shot and Archaludon kept Meteor Beam, then yeah it’ll just buff Archaludon more than anything else.

I think there's a key difference between the two.
Electro Shot is a non-stab signature move, the upside is mainly there to make up for the fact that well, it's non-stab.
Meteor Beam is learned by a lot of pokemon, stab and not, and it's strong enough to justify using Power Herb just for that free +1. It being able to 1-turn fire in sand would be really problematic. Imagine Lunala or heck even Mega-Glimmora being able to fire 1-turn Meteor Beams all the time. YIKES, that makes pre-nerf Urshifu look balanced.

 

[ant4456]

i know two people that have been playing pokemon champions but arent comp players, so i decided to ask them why they got into mons with champions and not showdown, and what they think about it

they both know they are being posted into a thread

screenshot dump

second friend (blue)

honestly reading this stuff makes me think champions mostly hit the mark? limited creativity is sometimes nice, they like graphics, they WANT to use the pokemon from their actual games but not for it to be a slogfest, which champions fixes

this is kinda why ive always understood game freak's insistance on tying the rpg to the official competitive game, and i wonder if this balance just kinda works out

ofc this is literally a sample size of: two, so if any of yall know/are casual players trying champions, im really curious the thoughts on it. the only opinions on champions i find online are from people who already like showdown

 

[Vengeance417]

I wish we had Covert Cloak to more easily withstand all of these Dire Claws.

I had a game where I was down 3-2, admittedly due to some bad plays on my part. The board state was my Sneasler and Mega Aggron THE WALL vs a Talonflame and Mega Dragonite. I've used Coaching and Iron Defense on THE WALL previously, and needed to use Dire Claw to chip away at my opponent. I Protect with THE WALL and use Dire Claw on Talonflame, and I get a Sleep proc. Lucky, for sure, but it was helpful. Next turn, I Dire Claw the Dragonite...I got another sleep proc. I proceeded to win from there.

Yeah I won the match, but Dire Claw absolutely bailed me out there, even with its proc chances nerfed lmao. I can only imagine how pissed my opponent was. I'd have been livid.

On a different note, I wish we had Clear Amulet for all the Intimidate spam, too, but that's not as much of an issue, and the heavy Intimidate use is allowing mons like Milotic and random Inner Focus, Defiant, Scrappy, Oblivious, etc mons to have viable niches.

 

[Elkos]

Considering the theme I feel like Meteor Beam shooting with no charge would work better with Gravity? Fixes the 30% perceived accuracy too!

Gravity could use some more love anyway.

 

[Worldie]

Gravity could use some more love anyway.

I don't think it should.

Gravity is a very dangerous move due to enabling what's effective degenerate strategies. High reward moves usually have low accuracy for a reason. Things like Sleep Powder, Hypnosis, Focus Blast, Hurricane, Muddy Water, Hydro Pump, etc, have been run regardless of their accuracy in both singles and doubles (on top of all the various 90% moves, hello Rock Slide) due to how swingy their effects are compared to the alternatives, even when there's one.
Heck I even ran into the dumb No Guard Fissure strats on ladder a couple times, I trashed them but boy you do not want this stuff to be reliable trust me.

The last thing this game needs is a "low/no drawback" way to make accuracy checks not a thing. Not without a massive rebalance of some of those low accuracy effects.

I wish we had Covert Cloak to more easily withstand all of these Dire Claws.

I agree but also don't.
For organized play, sure, this would be ok.
But man for ladder, if Covert Cloak was a thing, it turns already uncertain turns into just raw guessing games. Do I fake out the whimsicott / talonflame to prevent tailwind? But what if it's Sash? Or Cloak? Or something else entirely?

Similar point I can do for

On a different note, I wish we had Clear Amulet for all the Intimidate spam, too, but that's not as much of an issue, and the heavy Intimidate use is allowing mons like Milotic and random Inner Focus, Defiant, Scrappy, Oblivious, etc mons to have viable niches.

Currently Intimidate is very manageable, one or both of Sneasler and Milotic are on practically every team, to the point I'm starting to think to just ditch Incineroar (but then i auto-lose to Sun and M-Floette so maybe not).

The low amount of pokemon available and items available surprisingly creates a "mostly" stable ladder. Even in Bo1 you can make somewhat educated guesses on who runs what. Once more items come back, it's going to start being a much bigger shitshow of guessing games (at least until the meta stabilizes ig). I'd honestly rather take this lower count approach for a bit more.

(Besides, worlds will be played on the next regulation from what I understood, I do expect some somewhat decent additions to the pools. At minimum I'm expecting all non-restricted megas + several of the important VGC missing items like Assault Vest, Covert Cloak, Clear Amulet and a few more to return. Might be wrong, and I wouldn't exactly dislike a low power level worlds, but I have the feel that they will add a decent amount of stuff to not risk having a repetitive-ish meta of the same 3 archetypes.)