What it does on the ladder
Blastoise appears on 0.28% of Regulation M-B teams, which
is 122nd of the 277 Pokémon with enough games to measure.
The move it almost always carries is Protect, on 72.9% of sets.
The item is usually White Herb at 52%.
The ability is split: Rain Dish on 72.8% and Torrent on 27.2%.
Those are Smogon's published usage figures, not anything measured here, and they describe what
the ladder plays rather than what is strongest. The full set is in the panel above.
The Pokémon itself
Blastoise is number 9 in the National Dex, a Kanto Pokémon, Water
with a base stat total of 530 — 37th of the 234 Pokémon
legal in this regulation. Its best stat is Sp. Def at 105, 35th
in the format; its weakest is Speed at 78, 116th.
It can have Torrent and Rain Dish.
The Champions module tiers it UU.
It sits in a 3-stage line: Squirtle → Wartortle → Blastoise.
Not all of that line is legal in this regulation — Squirtle and Wartortle are not.
What gets through
As Water, 2 of the eighteen attacking types do extra damage to it. It
resists 4. The board above
has all of it. 8 other legal Pokémon share the same typing and the same board: Milotic, Politoed, Palafin, Vaporeon, Clawitzer and others.
What threatens it
Smogon publishes no head-to-head checks-and-counters data for doubles formats, so this list is
computed, not measured: the most-played Regulation M-B Pokémon carrying a damaging
move of a type Blastoise takes extra damage from.
- Charizard-Mega-Y — Solar Beam (Grass, ×2), on 64.4% of its sets
- Sinistcha — Matcha Gotcha (Grass, ×2), on 97.8% of its sets
- Farigiraf — Thunderbolt (Electric, ×2), on 44.8% of its sets
- Raichu-Mega-Y — Zap Cannon (Electric, ×2), on 99.7% of its sets
- Archaludon — Electro Shot (Electric, ×2), on 97.9% of its sets
- Venusaur — Leaf Storm (Grass, ×2), on 59.2% of its sets
Speed and weight
At level 50 with a boosting nature and full investment, Blastoise reaches
143 Speed; left uninvested with a neutral nature it sits at
98. Invested, it outruns 6 of the 20
most-used Pokémon in the regulation when they are invested too — which is the comparison that
decides who moves first.
It weighs 85.5 kg, so Grass Knot and Low Kick hit it for 80 base
power. That is a real consideration in a format where both are common.
Its move pool
Blastoise learns 120 moves in the Champions data.
80 of them do damage, across 11 of the eighteen
types, and 21 share a type with it and so get the same-type bonus.
Its hardest-hitting same-type move is Hydro Cannon at 150 base power.
It also has priority: Fake Out at +3 and Aqua Jet at +1.
That pool is what the team builder reads from when you seat it, and the
damage calculator will take it as the attacker with
the form already chosen.
