What it does on the ladder
Excadrill appears on 4.1% of Regulation M-B teams, which
is 36th of the 282 Pokémon with enough games to measure.
The move it almost always carries is Iron Head, on 99.1% of sets.
The item is usually Focus Sash at 90.2%.
The ability is split: Sand Rush on 97.7%, Mold Breaker on 2% and Sand Force on 0.3%.
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
Excadrill is number 530 in the National Dex, a Unova Pokémon, Ground and Steel
with a base stat total of 508 — 104th of the 234 Pokémon
legal in this regulation. Its best stat is Attack at 135, 5th
in the format; its weakest is Sp. Atk at 50, 206th.
It can have Sand Rush, Sand Force and Mold Breaker.
The Champions module tiers it OU.
It sits in a 2-stage line: Drilbur → Excadrill.
Not all of that line is legal in this regulation — Drilbur is not.
What gets through
As Ground and Steel, 4 of the eighteen attacking types do extra damage to it. It
resists 8 and is immune to 2. The board above
has all of it. 2 other legal Pokémon share the same typing and the same board: Steelix, Stunfisk-Galar.
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 Excadrill takes extra damage from.
- Incineroar — Flare Blitz (Fire, ×2), on 91.2% of its sets
- Garchomp — Earthquake (Ground, ×2), on 85.7% of its sets
- Charizard-Mega-Y — Heat Wave (Fire, ×2), on 99.2% of its sets
- Basculegion — Aqua Jet (Water, ×2), on 96.6% of its sets
- Sneasler — Close Combat (Fighting, ×2), on 99.7% of its sets
- Staraptor-Mega — Close Combat (Fighting, ×2), on 100% of its sets
Speed and weight
At level 50 with a boosting nature and full investment, Excadrill reaches
154 Speed; left uninvested with a neutral nature it sits at
108. 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 40.4 kg, so Grass Knot and Low Kick hit it for 60 base
power. That is a real consideration in a format where both are common.
Its move pool
Excadrill learns 75 moves in the Champions data.
47 of them do damage, across 10 of the eighteen
types, and 15 share a type with it and so get the same-type bonus.
Its hardest-hitting same-type move is Steel Beam at 140 base power, though the biggest number in the pool is Giga Impact at 150.
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.
