Pokemon’s video game competitive scene has an onboarding problem.
It’s had one since the birth of the Pokemon Video Game Championship (VGC for short) in 2008 due to hidden mechanics, tedious grinding, and some devious RNG. Now, almost two decades later, The Pokemon Company has the opportunity to make competitive Pokemon the most approachable it’s ever been. Thanks to Pokemon Champions, a battle simulator akin to Pokemon Stadium coming to Switch and mobile, players will be able to quickly and efficiently train and battle Pokemon. Not only that, but at the Pokemon World Championship last weekend The Pokemon Company announced that it will be the official way to compete in 2026’s Worlds.
This is huge.
For the uninitiated, getting a Pokemon “competitive ready” isn’t as simple as catching one. Factors such as Nature, Individual Values, and Effort Values can affect a Pokemon’s stats and all must be considered when training. On top of this, abilities and movesets can drastically change a Pokemon’s use case. Two identical Pokemon could have wildly different stats and moves in order to fill different roles on a team. For example, a Gyrados with a high speed stat, Intimidate (an ability that lowers opposing Pokemon’s attack), and Thunder Wave could serve as a support Pokemon that weakens tough opponents and slows them down with paralysis. Meanwhile, a Gyrados with a high attack stat, Moxie (an ability that increases the user’s attack after each knockout), and Earthquake could snowball into a serious threat. The problem is, apart from moves and abilities, stat information isn’t clearly presented in-game. Every generation–especially Pokemon Sword and Shield and Scarlet and Violet–have made minimal efforts to simplify the process with new items and mechanics.
And with those additions being so minor, competitive play can still be daunting. Building out a team in Scarlet and Violet–assuming you’ve completed the story and have plentiful resources–can take hours. Building a good team can take weeks, if not months. Because of this, many players turn to fanmade, web-based battle simulators like Pokemon Showdown in order to quickly build and test out different teams before committing the time and resources to create the team in-game. As someone who is entrenched in the competitive world, this makes sense. This is how things have been done for years, and because getting a Pokemon competitive ready has become marginally easier over the years, it doesn’t seem too bad. However, all it takes is a small step back to realize that for the vast majority of Pokemon players, the competitive scene is still inscrutable.
Let’s say you want to build a team around Raging Bolt in Pokemon Scarlet. For starters, in order to catch one, you’ll need to complete the game, most of its DLC, and the Blueberry Academy Pokedex. Then you’ll need to invest hours tweaking its stats through grinding or copious amounts of Pokemon dollars. Next you’ll need to find or craft the TMs needed for your desired moveset. Finally, you’ll need to give it an item that gels with its playstyle. All told, this can take hours, and you’ll need to do it at least five more times to build out a competitive team. A few weeks ago I did a video about why I have 500 hours in Pokemon Violet. This is why.
Enter Pokemon Champions. Based on the official website, Champions aims to keep the strategic depth of the mainline series while making it much easier to train and alter a Pokemon’s stats. Once you’ve recruited a Pokemon (or transferred one from Pokemon Home), you can use the training feature to manually adjust stats like attack and defense, change their nature (or stat alignment, as it appears on the website), and swap moves and abilities. All of these actions cost Victory Points, which can be earned by battling and cannot be purchased. As of this writing, we don’t know how much VP you’ll get for battling and what the in-game economy will look like; regardless, the entire training process looks far more streamlined–even if there’s still some math involved.
On top of a Pokemon’s base stats, there’s something called Effort Values. Buried in a Pokemon’s Summary page you can technically track a Pokemon’s EVs, but it doesn’t give you an actual number value making it functionally useless. Every four Effort Values gained through battling–or specific items, like vitamins or feathers–equates to one stat point. Any Pokemon can have up to 510 EVs with no more than 252 on a single stat. If you bust out a calculator, you’ll quickly realize that the math doesn’t math. If you do an even EV split across two stats, you’ll have six EVs left, and because four EVs equal one stat point, two of those points do nothing. If these numbers make your head spin, Google the damage calculation formula–it’s wild.
Pokemon Champions, at least on the surface, does away with Effort Values and lets you allocate 66 stat points (with a max of 32 per stat) across your Pokemon as you see fit. That means that if you fully invest into Special Attack and Speed, you’ll have two stat points left over instead of one. This may seem insignificant, but one extra stat point can be the difference between a knockout and an extra turn.
I realize I’m getting into the nitty gritty here, but for decades now competitive Pokemon has been gated by these hidden stats and obtuse mechanics. As a longtime fan, it’s been frustrating because the competitive side is the most exhilarating part, but the barrier to entry has always been thick. If Champions manages to capture the casual audience and get them to engage with Pokemon’s deeper battling mechanics, it could energize millions of Pokemon fans to take the leap into the competitive scene.
If that’s not enough of an incentive, consider things from a financial point of view. In order to compete in Pokemon battles, you need to own a Nintendo Switch and Pokemon Scarlet or Violet. If you want to keep up with the meta you’ll likely need both versions to cover for version-exclusive Pokemon. Pokemon Champions, however, is a free-to-play app coming to mobile and the Nintendo Switch. Meaning, you don’t even need to own a Nintendo console or Pokemon game to compete.
There are still a lot of questions, though. The most recent trailer showed off how to reallocate stat points, but what about Individual Values? These are inherent stats that a Pokemon is caught or hatched with. They can be maxed, but doing so can require significant resources. A simple solution would be to set every Pokemon’s IVs in Champions to 31 (the max value). However, this would limit the Trick Room strategy, a technique in which trainers enable their slowest Pokemon to go first. Naturally, a lot of Trick Room teams revolve around using Pokemon with zero speed IVs, meaning that if two Torkoals are out on the field, the one with zero speed IVs would move first under trick room. Without IVs, every Torkoal with zero speed investment would result in a speed tie, which leaves attack priority to a coin flip.
Additionally, we haven’t seen anything official around held items. Like abilities and stats, a held item can dramatically change a Pokemon’s role. A Dragonite with a Choice Band can hit harder than a standard Dragonite, but the Choice Band locks it into one move. Alternatively, one with a Silk Scarf boosts normal type moves making Extreme Speed even deadlier and doesn’t lock Dragonite into one attack.
What about bespoke mechanics like Z-Moves and Dynamax; will those be represented? Terastalization and Mega Evolutions are there–and that makes sense given that’s what Scarlet and Violet and Legends: Z-A are centered around–but can players use Z-Moves? How will it handle new Pokemon generations? Will every Pokemon be usable in Champions? I have a lot of questions, but in order for this to be the best way to experience Pokemon battles, it needs parity with the current generation. When the next generation drops, Pokemon Champions needs to reflect those new competitive defining mechanics as quickly as possible if it intends to keep competitive players engaged.
And then there’s the monetization of a free-to-play game looming over everything. If Pokemon Champions is free-to-play, what does the monetization look like? The Pokemon Company has already confirmed that you won’t be able to purchase Victory Points with real money. And while this likely means you won’t be able to train or recruit Pokemon using a credit card, surely the company will implement some means of bringing in cash. Hopefully this is limited to cosmetics.
So where does Pokemon Worlds, the official yearly championship competition, fit into all this? For starters, once Champions is implemented into the official tournaments, it could explode. It’s steadily gotten bigger thanks to streamlined mechanics and big personalities like Wolfe Glick, but it’s only tapped into a fraction of the player base. As of 2025, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet has sold over 27 million units. Obviously, not everyone comes to a Pokemon game for combat, but shattering the barrier to entry could motivate a latent audience to dive into competitive.
Pokemon often gets derided by older fans for being too easy. I can’t argue with this. The story is designed for players of all ages after all. However, there is an immense amount of depth in competitive battling that people often overlook. A few years ago Wolfe Glick, arguably the best Pokemon player in the world, released a video titled “Pokemon is Way More Complex Than You Know.” In it, he compares it to chess and breaks down how all the mechanics and the intense mental game interact in order to create one of the deepest combat systems of all time. The depth and difficulty is there, and always has been for folks willing to push through the barriers, but I can’t blame people for writing it off. Selfishly, as a longtime Pokemon fan, I just hope Pokemon Champions will be enough to finally convince more of my friends to give competitive Pokemon a shot.
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