What it does on the ladder
Empoleon appears on 0.15% of Regulation M-B teams, which
is 164th of the 277 Pokémon with enough games to measure.
The move it almost always carries is Flash Cannon, on 88.8% of sets.
The item is usually Life Orb at 30.9%.
The ability is split: Competitive on 98.1% and Torrent on 1.9%.
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
Empoleon is number 395 in the National Dex, a Sinnoh Pokémon, Water and Steel
with a base stat total of 530 — 41st of the 234 Pokémon
legal in this regulation. Its best stat is Sp. Atk at 111, 30th
in the format; its weakest is Speed at 60, 176th.
It can have Torrent and Competitive.
The Champions module tiers it UU.
It sits in a 3-stage line: Piplup → Prinplup → Empoleon.
Not all of that line is legal in this regulation — Piplup and Prinplup are not.
What gets through
As Water and Steel, 3 of the eighteen attacking types do extra damage to it. It
resists 10 and is immune to 1. The board above
has all of it. No other legal Pokémon has this typing.
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 Empoleon takes extra damage from.
- Garchomp — Earthquake (Ground, ×2), on 85.1% of its sets
- Sneasler — Close Combat (Fighting, ×2), on 99.9% of its sets
- Farigiraf — Thunderbolt (Electric, ×2), on 44.8% of its sets
- Staraptor-Mega — Close Combat (Fighting, ×2), on 100% of its sets
- Raichu-Mega-Y — Zap Cannon (Electric, ×2), on 99.7% of its sets
- Blastoise-Mega — Aura Sphere (Fighting, ×2), on 33.7% of its sets
Speed and weight
At level 50 with a boosting nature and full investment, Empoleon reaches
123 Speed; left uninvested with a neutral nature it sits at
80. Invested, it outruns 1 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 84.5 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
Empoleon learns 116 moves in the Champions data.
75 of them do damage, across 12 of the eighteen
types, and 22 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: Aqua Jet at +1 and Vacuum Wave 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.
