By Ethan Lee
Pokémon’s latest addition to their franchise is Pokémon Champions. Released on the 8th of April 2026, it introduces a much-improved, much more beginner-friendly approach to competitive and online Pokémon battles.
Filled with your favourite Pokémon, now battling online has never been easier.
What is competitive Pokémon?
Let’s start from the beginning. Competitive Pokémon has been around since nearly the beginning of the franchise.
Building your team of Pokémon and battling them against other people allows players to actually feel like they have been transported to the mythical world of Pokémon as a real Pokémon trainer.
In September of 2000, Pokémon officially recognised the competitive side of their game with the first official Pokémon tournament held in Sydney, Australia.
Since then, with each game released, the competitive scene has grown and grown.
Competitive Pokémon in the past worked like this:
First is the easy part: you would come up with a team of Pokémon or find one online.
That’s pretty much the end of the entire easy parts of competitive Pokémon.
Next, in whichever Pokémon game you were playing, you would have to go on a catching grind.
You see, when catching Pokémon, each Pokémon has a built-in stat alignment that can not change; this stat alignment dictates what this specific Pokémon will be strong at and what it is weak at from all its categories.
Which means if you catch the exact Pokémon you need, and its stat alignment wasn’t what you were looking for, it was useless, and you would need to catch another one.
It’s definitely a mind-numbing task considering there were 20 stat alignments at the time.
To add to this, a team is made up of six Pokémon, so you would have to do this whole catching process a total of six times.
Okay, so let’s say you’re at the point where you have all six of your team with the correct stat alignment after who knows how many hours to get them.
Your next process would be to level them all up to the max level.
You would have to do this by partaking in hundreds of trainer battles against NPCs (that’s ‘non-player characters’, for the inexperienced). To make this worse, you would have to battle specific Pokémon if you want a specific stat to increase for your Pokémon.
So now you would be hunting specific Pokémon to beat up over and over and over again for hours.
During this your Pokémon would also be asking to learn new moves, each Pokémon only gets four, so you would have to know which of their moves are worth keeping and which aren’t.
This whole way of building your competitive Pokémon team sucked.
It was drawn out, boring, and a lot of people just didn’t have the time to sink into creating their team. Ultimately, this was putting off a large number of Pokémon players from partaking in the competitive side.
Enter Pokémon champions
Yet rejoice! The times of dedicating days to your team are finally over with Pokémon champions!
Yes, that’s right, Pokémon Champions eradicates that whole old process.
This new game is the very first to solely focus on Pokémon’s competitive side. Unlike all the others, there is no mainline story to play; instead, the entire game is about building and battling competitively.
But exactly what is this new way of building your team?
I’m glad you asked!
Since there is no world for you to run around in and collect Pokémon, now you get Pokémon from the recruit menu.
Here, you’re introduced to a farm where you are shown a lineup of ten random Pokémon that you can recruit with their new VP currency.
But what is this new VP currency?
I’m glad you asked again!
VP is the main currency in Pokémon Champions. You get it by winning online battles and completing challenges within the game.
VP can buy you literally everything you will need to build your team.
It allows you to buy Pokémon.
Buy moves.
Buy stats.
Remember that set stat alignment? Yep, well, now if you got the wrong one, VP allows you to simply change it!
Building your competitive team literally takes minutes to do now (as long as you have the VP, of course).
What does this mean for competitive?
For the average Pokémon fan, this new system is a perfect and actually fun gateway into playing competitively.
Obviously, this now means that there is going to be a huge increase in players getting into competitive battling.
To help differentiate between the new learning players and the old experienced ones, Pokémon champions have introduced a tier system.
There are four tiers altogether.
You start in the Poke Ball tier, then after a certain number of wins, you jump to the Great Ball tier and so on.
However, each time you lose, you will also go down in progress.
It’s a skill-based matchmaking, where winning a match means you go against better players and losing means you go against worse players.
Another great aspect that Pokémon Champions introduces is a huge increase in creativity.
With how long the old system took, creativity was stuck at a minimum. Only a certain pool of Pokémon were worthy of actually dedicating that much time to being ready for competitive, meaning many Pokémon that were deemed average or even good but not good enough, were just abandoned competitively.
With this new quick system, trying out Pokémon comes with no risk of wasted time.
-Journalist and Pokémon player Ethan Lee playing using Machamp
The game currently has 186 Pokémon altogether, allowing for plenty of unique and interesting teams to be built and put to the test.
That being said, with the whole tier system, most likely the high tiers will still only see that select pool of Pokémon that are the most viable, but hey, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles at the high tiers.
Competitive Pokémon has never been this accessible
There you have it, that is how Pokémon’s newest game, Pokémon Champions, has managed to improve Pokémon’s competitive scene for all players – both new and old.
Not only this, but the game has just been released on IOS and Android devices on June 17th 2026, which means even more accessibility.
There truly never has been a better time to start your competitive Pokémon journey.
-Journalist Ethan Lee and Pokémon Fan Karmen Domotor discussing Pokémon Champions
