What it does on the ladder
Charizard appears on 0.08% of Regulation M-B teams, which
is 200th of the 282 Pokémon with enough games to measure.
The move it almost always carries is Heat Wave, on 88% of sets.
The item is usually Choice Scarf at 59.2%.
The ability is split: Solar Power on 88.7% and Blaze on 11.3%.
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
Charizard is number 6 in the National Dex, a Kanto Pokémon, Fire and Flying
with a base stat total of 534 — 29th of the 234 Pokémon
legal in this regulation. Its best stat is Sp. Atk at 109, 48th
in the format; its weakest is Defense at 78, 133rd.
It can have Blaze and Solar Power.
The Champions module tiers it UU.
It sits in a 3-stage line: Charmander → Charmeleon → Charizard.
Not all of that line is legal in this regulation — Charmander and Charmeleon are not.
What gets through
As Fire and Flying, 3 of the eighteen attacking types do extra damage to it, and Rock lands for quadruple. It
resists 6 and is immune to 1. The board above
has all of it. One other legal Pokémon shares the same typing and the same board: Talonflame.
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 Charizard takes extra damage from.
- Garchomp — Rock Slide (Rock, ×4), on 75.9% of its sets
- Basculegion — Aqua Jet (Water, ×2), on 96.6% of its sets
- Farigiraf — Thunderbolt (Electric, ×2), on 59.2% of its sets
- Archaludon — Electro Shot (Electric, ×2), on 98.6% of its sets
- Aerodactyl-Mega — Rock Slide (Rock, ×4), on 99.8% of its sets
- Blastoise-Mega — Water Spout (Water, ×2), on 96.4% of its sets
Speed and weight
At level 50 with a boosting nature and full investment, Charizard reaches
167 Speed; left uninvested with a neutral nature it sits at
120. Invested, it outruns 12 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 90.5 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
Charizard learns 132 moves in the Champions data.
87 of them do damage, across 13 of the eighteen
types, and 27 share a type with it and so get the same-type bonus.
Its hardest-hitting same-type move is Blast Burn at 150 base power.
It has no priority move, so it moves in Speed order every turn.
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.
