If you’ve played a Pokémon game, you have relationships to some of its various critters. Maybe you struggled to get past Cynthia’s infamous Garchomp in Pokémon Platinum. Maybe you picked Squirtle as your starter on your original copy of Pokémon Red and you’re fond of Blastoise to this day.
Me, when I see Blastoise—on the other side of Pokémon Champions’ neon battlefield—I see a threat; a statement of intent. It might set up with Shell Smash, a move that instantly turns it into a fast and threatening glass cannon. It might make one of my own mons waste their turn with Fake Out. Or it might go straight into a powerful attack—of which there are many it could know, which present a diversity of possible threats.
If you’ve never played Pokémon seriously, you might think that it’s easy to pick out the obvious correct play out of these options. These are, after all, games for children; when you casually play through the campaign of a Pokémon game, you have a panoply of advantages against NPC opponents with a limited bag of tricks. They’re still good enough to beat a ten-year-old—perhaps you were that ten-year-old once—but getting all the badges is a very solvable problem. Cynthia’s Garchomp will fold to a strong enough ice-type attack, as long as you can land one.
But when you sit across from another human being and try to play this game, it’s suddenly not so easy. That Garchomp could switch out into another pokémon waiting in the wings. It might hold an item like the Focus Sash, which will let it survive any one powerful attack and retaliate; or the Choice Scarf, which would make it fast enough to attack first and threaten your ice-type attacker with a Rock Slide before it can move. Lurking beneath the surface of the children’s game is a tight knot of intuition, deception, and strategy.
Take Zoroark—the Hisuian variant, who looks very much like if an anthropomorphic fox was leucistic, emo, and had eczema—a pokémon whose unique ability makes it appear to be another pokémon waiting in the wings. Its mere existence on your team forces your opponent to wonder: is one of the two pokémon he just sent out Zoroark in disguise?
Tricking someone into a bad play with Zoroark is sometimes subtle and incremental, a little finger on the scale of an opponent's threat assessment. But sometimes it's dramatic: Zoroark is immune to many common attacks, and its main job is to impersonate other pokémon to bait those same attacks. Fake Out is a very centralizing move, one of the most important moves in competitive Pokémon; it always goes before normal moves—regardless of the user’s actual speed—and causes its target to flinch, wasting their turn. To balance this power, it can only be used on the first turn after a pokémon was sent out. So the dynamics of Fake Out are that you don’t always have that option, but when you do your opponent is incentivized to play passively, perhaps using the move Protect to avoid taking damage from it and wait out that turn. So Fake Out is often paired with pokémon that know powerful set-up moves that can benefit from the space it creates; the Fake Out user is like a basketball player setting a screen.
Here's an example of how it works: say my opponent leads with Blastoise and Vivillon—a quirky pairing that supports Blastoise’s big damage with Vivillon’s ability to put threatening pokémon to sleep. I send out Whimsicott and Floette. Whimsicott is a support-oriented pokémon that’s immune to Vivillon’s Sleep Powder but not very threatening in itself. Floette, on the other hand, is a delete button. Its Light of Ruin attack can knock out Blastoise immediately, and it’ll move before either Blastoise or Vivillon have a chance to do anything.
What my opponent wants to do is use Vivillon’s Sleep Powder on Floette while Blastoise uses one of its strong attacks. But actually doing this would immediately lose their most important pokémon—Floette would knock out Blastoise before Vivillon has a chance to do anything—and put them in a bad position, even if Floette is put to sleep. So they opt instead to use Fake Out, a move that denies a pokémon’s ability to do anything for a turn, to slow down Floette just enough to get the sleep powder off and keep Blastoise safe.
We both lock in our moves; Blastoise’s Fake Out goes off first… and does nothing on Floette. Whimsicott moves next, firing a Moonblast into Vivillon that takes away most of its health. Floette then moves, using Snarl—a move that Floette can't learn—to finish off the Vivillon, do a little damage to Blastoise, and importantly weaken Blastoise’s future attacks. Floette, my opponent now realizes, wasn’t Floette at all; it was an impostor.
Zoroark, being a ghost type, is immune to Fake Out, which turns this dynamic inside-out: baiting them into Faking Out my Zoroark wastes their pokémon’s turn instead. It’s also incredibly satisfying, a concentrated dose of “ha, gottem” that hits me like a drug.
That rush is really the main reason to use Zoroark at all; it’s not actually a particularly strong pokémon on the merits. When battling on the Pokémon Champions ladder, you always see a preview of your opponent’s team before every match. My opponents know I have Zoroark. They can factor it in their calculations. But even if they do, the fog of war that Zoroark creates may force them into less aggressive, safer plays that cover for the possibility. It’s like a little bit of R.U.S.E. in my Pokémon.
Competitive pokémon battling is like nothing else I know in video games. There's so few points of comparison and most people haven't played any of them. These are turn-based console RPG battles against another player, itself something that has not frequently been a game mode in other series—I'm told the one in Golden Sun for the Game Boy Advance is "mid".
But Pokémon is full of very particular twists on this idea. Its simultaneous turn structure, where you lock in your moves at the same time as your opponent and then they play out in order (with faster pokémon moving first) is really the core of what makes it special. The speed mechanic is quietly really complex. The official competitive format has always been double battles, with two pokémon facing off on each side. This multiplies the complexity of each individual turn, making for matches that are fast but dense with possibility.
For example: one of the moves Zoroark learns, Icy Wind, causes both opponents to lose speed and as a result it can be used to change the expected turn order mid-turn: A fast Zoroark can use it first to delay both opponents, allowing a slower partner to go next—which can be the difference between securing a knockout, and being knocked out instead. Speed is a huge component of adding nuance to what otherwise would be very binary matchups between Pokémon. Dragon-type moves, for example, all deal double damage to dragon-type Pokémon. When two dragons face off against each other, it’s like a Western movie duel: whoever draws first wins. This means that questions like “does Garchomp have a good match-up into Dragonite” are actually deeply contextual.
Game Freak's embrace of the competitive side of the game has been slow and gradual, but very real. Regular, official Pokémon tournaments, and an official competitive format, have existed for over a decade now—the "real" start of the circuit is generally pinned to Pokémon Black and Pokémon White in 2012. But there was always a deep tension between pokémon as game pieces and pokémon as "real" creatures that live in your Nintendo.
Pokémon isn't like other RPGs where you get to consciously allocate stats and abilities. Pokémon have both nature and nurture that make them unique; your Charizard might just be born faster than mine, or it might have been trained differently and thus have different stats. But in a competitive environment, players are pushed to set up fully optimal pokémon, a process of breeding and training that could take a long time.
Over time, the games included more and more elements focused on balancing competitive play (like items that exist only to create competitive counterplay), as well as more tools to perfectly mold pokémon into competitive game pieces.
Pokémon Champions simply does away with all of this. Pokémon have only one immutable characteristic: their species. Everything else can be changed easily and instantly, from stats to moves. There's still a barrier to entry, but it's much more about knowledge and understanding the game than it is about sheer grinding. And if you've played any pokémon game on the Switch previously, you can just send those pokémon into Champions and use them competitively. Funnily enough this means that I can now use, in competitive play, the specific pokémon I used to beat the main story in Pokémon Sword and Violet, which previously would have been more work and grinding than simply breeding new perfect specimens.
This lower barrier to entry finally unlocked competitive pokémon for me, and I find myself hooked. However, is lowering that barrier to entry a good thing? If it means that I am now losing sleep over the fact that Aura Sphere from a Jolly nature Mega Gardevoir isn't a guaranteed knockout on max HP Archaludon? Perhaps I was better off looking through the shop window at this world, as I did for years.
For an outsider looking in, competitive Pokémon can look like a very elaborate version of rock-paper-scissors, a pure guessing game where there's nothing more to it than "reading" an opponent. And it is true that making reads is part of the game; it's a game that fully embraces the unresolvable logic of "if I do X, my opponent can defeat it by doing Y; but if they go for Y, they lose to Z..."
Getting those predictions right is intoxicating; it's just an incredible feeling to say out loud to yourself what's going to happen, lock in the moves that perfectly counter your opponent's play, and then watch as it plays out exactly like you drew it up.
But what you start to realize when you actually play it is that through repetition and observation, you develop intuitions about how the game is going to go and what your opponent is going to do. It’s a lot like one of the other competitive games I’ve been obsessed with, chess: You learn to read patterns and unpick the tangle of possibilities at a subconscious level, culling the obviously bad plays to evaluate the ones that merit calculation. And much like in chess, brilliance often comes from finding the plays that superficially seem to make no sense.
Pokémon is a game that has both inherent variance—many moves have random effects or a chance to miss—and the human variance of reading and guessing an opponent. But in truth, that variance is the ganache on top of the cake; it’s a layer of excitement—or frustration—sitting on a very solid strategic foundation. Like a big topdeck in Magic: the Gathering or missing that 90% shot in XCOM, it provides those hits of surprise that make the game delicious and moreish.
But real mastery doesn’t come from getting a sick read every turn, it comes from understanding the dynamics of a matchup so that you can render your opponent’s choices irrelevant. Sometimes this looks like hedging, making an in-between play that is safe no matter what they do. Sometimes it looks like understanding that their choice is actually meaningless; that you can play aggressive because their counterplay is weak, and even if they go for it you’ll win the long game anyway.
Eventually, you start not just noticing those advantages but engineering them; like a chess master judo-ing their opponent into an endgame they know they can win, you start to think in terms of win conditions like “knock out their Kingambit so they have no answer to a Basculegion endgame” or “get Charizard next to Aerodactyl inside Tailwind.”
Building this framework of mental shortcuts—win conditions, heuristics, abstractions like pressure and momentum—is the real learning curve of the game. In the limited time you have to lock in your moves each turn, there’s not enough time to calculate every possibility, but there is some. That melding of intuition and hard logic is a fundamental part of the game, familiar to anyone who’s played speed chess or Magic.
But Champions is that feeling in a hyperbaric chamber. No turn is ever rote, especially once you step above seeing how to win the turn and into seeing how to win the game. The zippy pace of play makes it almost like a rapid-fire demo on the concept of Thinking, Fast and Slow. Questions like "who is presenting a threat here" are often flipped on their head, or nested inside themselves. This is a game where you can lose because you knocked out one of your opponent's Pokémon at a disadvantageous time—that is, there are wrong ways to make progress.
The mind games have a very real foundation of actual strategy backing them up. Zoroark's ability matters because it matters whether a pokémon is itself or Zoroark in disguise. But that difference is only very rarely a binary question of whether you got it right or not. It's this rich landscape of opportunity, cost, and risk. Sometimes I'll see an opponent make a great play that cuts through the ambiguity; they'll find a path to destroy my ruse not by correctly answering the "is it Zoroark" question, but by ensuring that it doesn't matter.
If my opponent sees Sylveon on my team and they suspect that it's Zoroark, they might choose to Throat Chop it—a move that is super effective on actual Zoroark and ineffective on Sylveon. But also it disables Sylveon's most powerful attack Hyper Voice; a reasonable hedge. Zoroark’s ruse only ever lasts one turn; it’s over as soon as Zoroark uses a move it’s not “supposed” to have, and damaging Zoroark will break its illusion. So those moments of ambiguity are very fleeting, and as the Zoroark player you need to make the most of them. That one good hedge is enough to defuse the threat.
But the thing about Pokémon is that being in a close match or a losing position will push you to that point of strategic discomfort where victory is only reachable through a thicket of variance. If one is behind, sometimes you need to rely on luck or stone cold prediction. Hence, the art of using Zoroark lies in forcing opponents to make the hard read by denying that hedging play. Make them call the bluff: No, that's definitely Sylveon, I need to hit it harder than that. Like in Magic or Poker, playing from behind means playing to your outs, however improbable. But unlike in those games, you’re often not relying on the pure luck of the draw but on a deep intuition about another player’s behavior, which makes those moments of lucking out all the more satisfying.
That's what makes it work, because at a glance it really shouldn't work. Pokémon's battle system seems too simple, too stark, too binary, too brutal, too riddled with hidden information and guessing games. Pokémon regularly go down in one hit, and flubbing your first turn can decide the entire match. That sharpness is what makes it so satisfying to get a turn exactly right—and so crushing to mess up.
But a game being sharp doesn't mean it's simplistic or even binary. There are many different ways to approach winning in Pokémon; the "level 0" strategy of simply picking pokémon that are both very fast and very strong is perfectly viable but it's also only a starting point. The game incorporates “sideways” strategies like Perish Song (a move that causes every pokémon on the field to faint in three moves, unless it switches out first) and perversions like Trick Room (a move that inverts the speed mechanic, causing faster pokémon to go last).
Pokémon can be used in unexpected and surprising ways; while you know which Pokémon your opponent has, you don’t know their exact configuration of items, stats and moves. One of my favorite Pokémon to use is Archaludon—typically, a ponderous and hard-to-kill tank that relies on powering itself up over multiple turns—with the Choice Scarf item. The Choice Scarf doubles a pokémon’s speed but locks it into the first move you pick when you send it out. It inverts the normal dynamics of Archaludon, turning it into a suicidally aggressive attacker that uses Draco Meteor—a move that’s very powerful upfront but actually weakens subsequent attacks—to rapidly remove threats.
But experience lets you see through these surprises. A naive opponent might be caught off guard by fast Archaludon, but many will immediately clock that this is what’s going on by the absence, on my team, of a pokémon to set the rain weather condition that normal Archaludon relies on. “Scouting” is very much a factor, too; some plays are ideal because they give you information at low cost. The hidden information plays out more like a puzzle than like a stacked deck. Only one pokémon on a team can hold a specific item, for example, so clearing unknowns by process of elimination is a real factor. Knowledge of the metagame wins battles.
This is ultimately what tames this game’s apparent sharpness and ambiguity. The knife is always there, but you can learn to see the angles; you can come to understand where to stand, how to move, so that the ambiguity will resolve in your favor. Zoroark’s mind games leverage knowledge and careful planning as much as pure surprise factor. Obviously, I don’t always succeed in this. But mostly I am not caught by what feels like randomness; it’s most often a play that I didn’t consider or a possibility I didn’t account for. I keep coming back because there’s something to learn from every time I’m left bleeding out on the floor.