today, we’re going over five beginner tips for Pokemon Champions that will ensure you’re off to a good start.
Pokemon Champions is available now on Nintendo Switch, and it’s now the central hub of competitive Pokemon. All future tournaments and competitions will be hosted on Champions, which means it’s a great time to get involved with the competitive scene if you’ve never given it a try before.
Do the tutorials
This one’s probably pretty obvious, but there are tutorials available in-game that actually have really good rewards for completing them. These include VP, Quick Coupons, and Training Tickets, and you’ll need all of these items to successfully build teams in Pokemon Champions. The tutorials don’t take too long – they’re short and helpful, and are certainly a good place to start. One of the tutorials actually will give you Mega Stones for Garchomp, Beedrill, Gyarados, Steelix, Heracross, Aggron, Manectric, and Abomasnow for free, so definitely do that one. While we’re here, let’s quickly go over Pokemon Champion’s in-game currencies. You actually can’t buy any of these currencies with real money – they’re all earned. VP is the main currency you can buy items, Pokemon, and Mega Stones with, and you generally will earn about 300 per win. An average Mega Stone costs about 2,000 VP, which means you’ll have to win around six battles.
Quick Coupons allow you to recruit Pokemon for your team, and you can either choose to recruit them for 7 days for free or recruit them permanently in exchange for VP or a Teammate Ticket. If you have a bunch of Pokemon from main series games in Pokemon Home, you can transfer them over and completely skip the recruitment process. Otherwise, you can use VP or a Quick Coupon to access a lineup of multiple Pokemon, from which you can pick just one. Overall, it’s definitely better to transfer in Pokemon from Home if you can – as long as they’re fully evolved, they’ll work just fine in Champions (which does not include unevolved but viable Pokemon like Clefairy and Porygon2 at the moment). Your Pokemon’s level doesn’t matter at all either, as levels are hidden in Pokemon Champions.
Training Pokemon normally costs VP, but Training Tickets let you make as many changes as you want to one Pokemon in exchange for one ticket. That said, I’d only recommend using a Training Ticket when you are making multiple changes to a Pokemon – it’s not really worth it if you’re only changing one move or changing some stats. In those cases, you should probably use VP instead as the VP cost won’t be too high. The Pokemon Champions Starter Pack, which costs about $6, includes a ton of Training Tickets and is actually a decent value. Speaking of which…
Don’t worry about the Battle Pass
I gave Pokemon Champions’ Battle Pass a shot, and yes, there are definitely benefits compared to not having it. That said, the Battle Pass feels very inessential and doesn’t have a ton in terms of exclusive rewards. The exclusives are mostly clothing, in fact, and the other rewards such as Mega Stones and Pokemon are all obtainable through normal gameplay. The Battle Pass is also $10 USD per season, which is definitely not going to be worth it if you’re thinking of buying every Battle Pass for every season. They do load you up on VP at the end of the rewards list, but they’re still probably not worth it.
Pokemon Champions’ membership is a little more enticing, and it’s $50 USD per year. That being said, if you’re new to competitive Pokemon you probably won’t need it. It increases your box storage to over 1,000, and you almost certainly won’t need that many slots if you’re just starting out. So for now, I’d recommend sticking to the free tier unless you see something that really interests you – at present, Pokemon Champions’ monetization isn’t terribly aggressive.
Understand stats and moves
In Pokemon Champions, EVs and IVs are gone. Instead, each Pokemon can now add a total of 66 stat points to their arsenals, which essentially replaces EVs. So for example, previously, a Charizard would run 252 EVs in Special Attack, 4 EVs in Special Defense, and 252 EVs in Speed. Now, it runs 32 extra Special Attack points, 2 extra Special Defense points, and 32 extra Speed points to get the exact same boosts. You can change a Pokemon’s EVs from the Train Pokemon menu – you don’t have to KO wild Pokemon anymore like in main series games! Basically, though, Pokemon often max out two of their stats with 32 extra points and then put the remaining 2 points into a third slot. For example, Garchomp often runs 32 Attack, 32 Speed, and then 2 in Defense, HP, or Special Defense. Some players run extremely specific stat spreads to reach certain benchmarks, but if you’re just starting out in competitive Pokemon, that’s almost certainly going to be too complex for now. Right now, it’s probably best to run 32 in two stats and 2 in a third.
I’d also recommend starting with single battles, as there are fewer Pokemon on the field and thus the battles are easier to understand. You might need to pull up a website like Bulbapedia or Serebii to be able to know your opposing Pokemon’s stats and ability – Speed is particularly important. In fact, it’s certainly the most important stat in competitive Pokemon. We can’t list the Speed stat of all Pokemon here, but some of the fastest Pokemon in the game right now are Mega Alakazam, Mega Aerodactyl, Dragapult, and Mega Greninja. Pokemon with high Speed stats almost always go first, of course, which means they have a much higher chance of KOing your Pokemon before it can move.
Competitive Pokemon is a bit too complex to fully list out in text, and a lot of it is just practicing in ranked or casual matches. We suspect the lower-ranked opponents may be bots, so not every opponent you fight is going to be a real human that absolutely wallops you and puts your skills to shame. It’s easier than ever to get Pokemon battle-ready in Champions, so this is still a really good time to get involved.
Use the GTS
There’s been a bit of a controversy on Twitter. What else is new? In all seriousness, the controversy is that Mega Floette, one of the best Pokemon in the format, is only available in Champions if you transfer it in from Pokemon Legends: Z-A. In that game, Floette is a post-game reward that takes a long time to earn. So if you don’t own Pokemon Legends: Z-A, how are you supposed to get it? Pokemon Home’s GTS! You can often put up a spare Shiny Pokemon or (less likely) a standard Legendary Pokemon and ask for Eternal Flower Floette. Wait long enough, and you’ll get one, and you can then transfer it to Pokemon Champions and earn its Mega Stone as well. Just make sure you ask specifically for Eternal Flower Floette, because a normal Floette won’t work.
Don’t train in other games
You might have had the same idea I had – bring a Pokemon into Champions, find that it costs too much VP to train it, and then put it into one of my main series Pokemon games to train it instead. That doesn’t work! If a Pokemon goes into Champions, the game takes a snapshot of its current status and uses that from now on. From that point onward, any training done in other games will not count for Champions, so if you want to train a Pokemon outside of Champions, do it before you ever transfer it over. It’s kind of a silly system, to be honest, but oh well.
If you’ve got any of your own tips to share for Pokemon Champions, feel free to do so in the comments down below!
