Data sources and dependencies

Maintainer note: data refreshes are manual; availability depends on the source.

If you are here to check whether a number can be trusted, the companion page Calculation methodology explains how these inputs become the numbers on screen.

At a glance

1. Game data: PokeAPI

pokeapi.co supplies the reference layer: base stats, types, abilities and their descriptions, moves with their type, base power, accuracy, category and description, items, and every species forme.

It also supplies a fallback learnset, used only where the Champions learnset below has no entry for a species. It is built from PokeAPI's own move list for that exact forme, taking any learn method as learnable. Alolan Ninetales carries a different learnset from Ninetales, and the builder respects that.

Every species PokeAPI carries is synced, formes included. PokeAPI asks that consumers cache what they fetch, so the app keeps its own copy and reads from that. Nothing you do in the app calls out to PokeAPI.

2. Usage data: Pikalytics

pikalytics.com supplies most of what the app knows about what people actually play. Per Pokémon that means:

• •Moves, with usage share. This drives the moves an opponent is presumed to have and the weighting in the Draft Board's threat score.
• •Items and abilities, with usage share.
• •Teammates, for reading a lead into a likely back half.
• •Games played, which is how much weight the sample deserves.

Data is imported manually, using a provider period and regulation, from the full roster rather than a top-50 summary. The source is Pikalytics's Champions tournament collection, built from submitted team sheets.

Pikalytics also publishes a ladder collection for the same regulation, derived from replays. We do not use it: a replay only proves what a battle revealed, so abilities that never announce themselves are absent from it entirely and announced ones can be attributed to the wrong Pokémon. Set percentages from the two collections are not comparable, and neither carries EV spreads.

Which players a snapshot describes

This changes between regulations, and it changes what a percentage means. Regulations M-A and M-B were taken from the provider's console Ranked feed: people playing on their own console. Regulation M-C has no console feed. It is taken from the provider's Champions tournament collection: the team sheets players submit at official events.

A third option exists for M-C, the Pokémon Showdown ladder feed, and it is deliberately not used. It is rebuilt from replays, so it records only what a battle showed. Abilities that never announce themselves are missing from it (Sneasler came back with no Unburden), announced ones are credited to the wrong Pokémon, and a move's percentage counts how often it was seen rather than how often it was on the team.

All three are real competitive play but they are different groups of players, so percentages are not directly comparable across regulations.

The app records which one a snapshot came from rather than leaving it to be inferred. The provider's own date-like label cannot be used for it: the console M-B feed and the M-C feeds are filed under the same 2026-05 key, so that label is a filing key, not a collection month.

2a. EV spread usage: Smogon

EV spreads are the one thing Pikalytics does not publish for Regulation M-C, for either its ladder or its tournament feed. Spreads are not recoverable from public Showdown replays either: a replay records species, level and gender, and never the EVs behind them.

Smogon's usage stats do publish them, because Smogon runs the Showdown server and has the private battle logs that carry each player's submitted team. Their monthly dumps include the full EV spread distribution for every species.

The catch is timing: a month's stats are published on the 1st of the following month. Regulation M-C began 9 September 2026, so the first M-C dump is expected 1 October 2026. Until it is imported, the app has no measured EV spreads for M-C and says so, on the regulation sticker and wherever a spread would otherwise appear.

Spreads arrive in Champions EV points, the game's own 0 to 32 per stat denomination, and are stored exactly as reported. They are converted to conventional 0 to 252 EVs only at the moment a calc needs them.

3. Damage engine: @smogon/calc

@smogon/calc v0.10.0, MIT licensed, maintained by the Smogon community. It is the engine behind the Smogon damage calculator, which is to say it is the same math most VGC players already check their calcs against.

Every damage number in the app is produced by it, and nothing about the damage formula is reimplemented here. The app adds only the handful of Champions-specific mechanics that exist in no other calculator, which the Calculation methodology page lists in full.

Turn order is the exception. The engine does not compute Speed order, so that formula is the app's own, built on the standard stat formula.

4. Regulation legality: metavgc.com

Which species, items, and moves a regulation permits is not derivable from usage data. Usage records only what people play, and a legal pool is always far wider than that, so using popularity as a stand-in would quietly rule out most of what you are allowed to bring.

The legal pool therefore comes from a published per-regulation legal list, currently metavgc.com. That list is what the Team Builder filters species and moves against.

Items are not enforced. Published item lists are unreliable, and have omitted staples that are plainly legal. The list is carried for reference, but the builder never blocks on it. Treat item legality as your call, not the app's.

4a. Which moves a species can learn: Showdown's Champions data

A regulation's move list says which moves exist in the format. It does not say which Pokémon can learn them, and Champions gives each species a much smaller pool than it has across the wider series.

That per species pool comes from the champions data mod in pokemon-showdown, which is also what the Showdown Champions ladder validates teams against. It reproduces the published Regulation M-C move changes independently: Politoed losing Pound, Archaludon losing Mirror Coat and Metal Burst, Slash becoming available, Wish and Strength Sap dropping to 8 PP.

Two things follow from how it is maintained. The file describes whichever regulation is current upstream, with past regulations expressed as separate deltas, so the app pins it to a specific commit and only applies it to the regulation it was taken for. Older regulations keep the PokeAPI fallback, which is why a move removed this season does not retroactively vanish from last one.

It is community-maintained rather than official. It covers 261 of the 262 species on the Regulation M-C roster; Floette-Eternal has no entry upstream and keeps the PokeAPI fallback.

5. Sprites and icons

Pokémon sprites come live from Pokémon Showdown's sprite server, the Gen 5 pixel set at 96 by 96, front and back.

Champions' custom Megas have no sprite on any server, so they show their base species instead. Mid-battle, a base silhouette tells you more than a question mark does.

Item icons come from the PokeAPI sprites repository, not from Showdown. Showdown only ships individual files for older-generation items, so Assault Vest, Safety Goggles, and anything newer have no icon there. The PokeAPI repository covers everything the app can put in an item slot.

Champions Mega Stones have no icon anywhere, so they render a generic Mega Stone glyph served by the app itself.

6. Typefaces

Four families, loaded from Google Fonts:

7. What is hand-authored here

Not everything on the board came from somewhere else. These are written and maintained in this project.

These are checked automatically against the engine's own data rather than by eye. The Calculation methodology page explains how.

8. What the app does not use

Worth stating plainly:

• •No tracking beyond a visit counter. Cloudflare Web Analytics counts page views without cookies. There is no Google Analytics, no session recording, and no advertising network.
• •No data from Pokémon Showdown's usage statistics. Showdown does not run Pokémon Champions. Usage comes from Pikalytics.
• •No scraping of your battles. The board is filled in by you.

The only other third-party requests your browser makes while using the app are for fonts, Pokémon sprites, and item icons, from the sources named above.

9. Attribution

Pokémon and all related names are trademarks of Nintendo, Creatures Inc., and GAME FREAK Inc. Championite is an unofficial fan project, is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them, and claims no ownership of the game data it displays.

Thanks are owed to the projects this app leans on, all of which are maintained by people who did not have to make any of it public: the Smogon community for the damage calculator, the usage statistics and the Champions learnset data, PokeAPI for the reference data and sprites, Pikalytics for the usage statistics, Pokémon Showdown for the sprite set, and metavgc for the regulation guides.

Found something wrong? A wrong number is worth reporting, and so is a source credited incorrectly on this page.