X & Y Battle Spot Doubles: An Early Look At Pokémon Usage

While we still don’t have an official ruleset for the VGC ’14 season, many players have been battling on the Doubles ladder on the in-game Battle Spot feature in order to get practice with the X & Y mechanics and to gauge the strength of new and changed Pokémon. Over the past couple of weeks, I slowly collected some data about the Pokémon that players on the ladder were using by collecting the rosters of the six Pokémon opponents rated 1700 or higher I ran into were using and compiling them. Since collecting data on my would be slow, I got some help from Simon, skarm, and Unreality, and also pulled data from Cybertron and iss’s stream archives. I ended up with 131 teams total to pull data from, which is still a relatively small sample of 1700+ teams, but a large enough number that I think it’s fair to say you get a reasonably accurate view of the Battle Spot Doubles metagame from looking at it. I ended up with incomplete data on a few teams, and most likely due to data entry errors the total number of Pokémon is a little lower than it should be (774 instead of the expected 786), but the listing below should give a fairly accurate view of the metagame on Battle Spot. Only Pokémon with more than two uses are listed, and the data of each trainer was only recorded once even if we battled them multiple times or a trainer battled multiple players collecting data unless the trainer in question changed their team between games.

While the relevance of this data is sort of sketchy, since we expect a few of these Pokémon probably won’t be available in Standard this year (the Pokémon who are not in the Kalosdex, italicized), and PokéBank transfers will shake up the game a lot if they are allowed, I think this is really good preliminary data to begin gauging the relative popularity of Pokémon based on the international competition on Battle Spot. Winter Regionals are only two months away, so hopefully having this information available now will help players get prepared if they haven’t had a chance to battle much yet. I’m biased since most of my recent matches are recorded, but I haven’t been recording data for most of my battles and the usage still feels like a pretty accurate representation of what I’ve seen on the ladder to me.

If you’d like to contribute to my usage tracking, feel free and PM me data about your opponents. I need the following information: your opponents rating, their location, the six Pokémon they had on team preview spelled correctly, and optionally their name to make it easier not to count the same teams twice, if you can read it. It’s definitely better if you do this in an online spreadsheet so I can copy and paste, but I’ll work with what I get. I would actually really prefer we didn’t just do a group Google Spreadsheet for this one because I’d prefer not to make a database for team scouting in the process… just PM me the data and I’ll compile and present it.  I’m still only interested in the teams of 1700+ rated players, as I’d like to focus on Pokémon that players with at least reasonable success are using in order to gauge the metagame on the top half of the ladder, since getting to 1700 already isn’t very difficult.

Happy planning, hope this helps out people who haven’t had a chance to play much.

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