Get ready to experience everything you love about Pokémon battles all in one place—in Pokémon Champions. This new, battle-focused game will feature familiar mechanics such as Pokémon types, Abilities, and moves, creating an environment conducive to rich and varied strategies for new and experienced Trainers alike. It’s not just familiar mechanics—you’ll be able to bring in classic Pokémon from Pokémon HOME, too! Look forward to cross-platform battles alongside your favorite Pokémon on Nintendo Switch and mobile, with a variety of different modes available for your desired experience.

Very very exciting stuff!

Super excited for this. I battles competitively on SV a LOT so a game focused solely on battling is super fun to see in development.

I am hoping there are different routes for competing: some that have no restricted Pokémon allowed, others that allow one restricted etc. The problem with SV is you have to stick to the regulations and that's it so it'd be great to be able to choose teams with all sorts of combinations and battle with different strategies in different formats and regulations!

I will defo keep looking into this the closer it gets to release date because I am more of a exploration type player when it comes to Pokémon but I do like the battle aspect too so I wouldn't be apposed to it

April release! Coming to smartphones too later in the year.

I still battle competitively every single day on S&V online VGC. I hope this extends that and allows me to continue my love of online battling and then some.

Don't let me down!

Very excited for this, I battle a lot competitively too and use Pokémon Showdown too so having something like that officially on actual hardware will be crazy, it seems beyond my comprehension that this could happen if you told me this even a year or two ago!!

This is interesting! I think it's a step in the right direction for battling and levels the playing field a bit (or at least saves a lot of time levelling it!).

Champions is confirmed as the VGC software for future World's Championships. Good by SV battling era D:

this is gonna be so bad for my daily screentime omg

I’m not sure how I feel about it completely taking over the main series games for competitive battles, but it does make things a lot more accessible for people. Things like wanting a 0 speed IV for Trick Room, grinding or getting lucky is gruelling and just allowing a bit more control will hopefully bring more people in and allow everyone to try any Pokémon they want, presumably as long as they caught it but you can

I’m also wondering how much they’ll decide to charge for the paid features lol. I have plenty of Pokémon built in SV anyway but I will have so much fun building new ones as quickly as this will allow. In the SwSh era I used to do kind of “anti” builds that were the opposite of what you should use the Pokémon for just for fun on the casual mode, like special Cinderace just to catch people off guard and yeah they didn’t work but I just found it fun to try, stuff like that will be fun as well when you can just make anything on the fly.

I am happy for the shift to a game solely designed for competitive battling. It also means they can focus on improving the game mechanics for the story modes of the main games and devote everything to making them as good as possible (SV away from online battling was piss poor on reflection).

The grinding for 0 speed trick room mons etc being a thing of the past is SO welcomed. A waste of time when everyone would do it when battling competitively so removing it saves time for everyone and makes the playing field more accessible for those that don't put the time into perfect IVs.

All in all it looks too good to be true if they can pull it off. I am waiting with so much trepidation because it could be absolute perfection if done right and what we have all yearned for for decades!

April 8th release date!

Abilities of 3 starter megas revealed too. Meganium's ability means all of its move work as though there is intense sun - going to be very fun to play with/against.

Emboar having Mold Breaker is weak af. They could've gone for something much more fun than that.

secretly happy the monstrosity that is emboar got trolled while the other two got signature abilities lollll

so soon! excited

Tepig is one of my fave starters, but Emboar being shafted is lowkey so funny, like not even idk Supreme Overload, they just give it the most generic ability possible when I think it would already struggle to find a place on a team. Lower tier in Smogon singles I guess, that’s about it.

Mega Meganium’s glow up from the original is mental, love that for her when regular Meganium has been the weakest starter for over quarter of a decade. Fire coverage with Weather Ball, instant Solar Beams, 75% healing from Synthesis?!

Wow Emboar got done DIRTY but I echo Liam, I'm glad Meganium got given a very much deserved blessing with Mega Sol - I have wanted a permanent Power Herb ability to be a reality for a while, so I'm glad we've got some form of that! Can't wait to see what abilities Scovillain, Greninja, Scolipede, Glimmora, Chimecho and Absol Z get!

I might treat myself to this when it gets released but it depends on my funds, praying I get a new job in time or something. I only have slight FOMO over not being able to play Pokopia, this will give me major FOMO.

Incineroar has apparently lost Knock Off I wonder if this will be enough to knock him from one of the top pedestals/usage pretty much every competition. I'll still be running him but that is a massive loss for him!

15 hours ago, HausofMayhem said:

Incineroar has apparently lost Knock Off I wonder if this will be enough to knock him from one of the top pedestals/usage pretty much every competition. I'll still be running him but that is a massive loss for him!

As long as Fake Out and Parting Shot are still a thing I don't think he's ever gunna be going anywhere tbf 😅

4 hours ago, Doug said:

As long as Fake Out and Parting Shot are still a thing I don't think he's ever gunna be going anywhere tbf 😅

They still are so yes I think he's safe! *.*

Incineroar didn’t have Knock Off at the start of gen 8 (it got it as a transfer move with Home compability) so I do think it will be fine and it may even get it back with gen 10 or something. I’m surprised they did it since a lot of the changes seem to be making the game more fast paced and that was a great tool for progress and momentum for Incineroar.

Also Protect being 8pp heals my soul. Alomomola and Umbreon Wish+Protect DIEEEE

anything that makes stall harder is good in my books

The Home datamine has revealed two new abilities, Piercing Drill (basically a budget version of Unseen Fist which does 1/4 damage instead of ignoring protection entirely) and Spicy Spray (burns the attacker after Scovillain takes damage, physical or special). Spicy Spray would be crazy on any Pokémon of actual bulk instead of something as frail and slow as Scovillain lol

Edit: we also seem to have Thermal Boost (1.5x boost to Fire) for Pyroar and some kind of upgraded Bad Dreams for Darkrai (which causes 1/4 damage rather than 1/8 to sleeping foes), as well as Dark Current for Eelektross which we don’t know the effect of yet. The big winners seem to be Staraptor with Contrary and Golisopod with Tough Claws, although I kind of wanted Water Bubble or Heatproof for it lol

Lucario and Zeraora basically have no ability as they seem to have Prankster and Speed Boost respectively despite already both being 150+ speed?!