What it does on the ladder
Lucario appears on 0.12% of Regulation M-B teams, which
is 178th of the 282 Pokémon with enough games to measure.
The move it almost always carries is Close Combat, on 78% of sets.
The item is usually Choice Scarf at 49.3%.
The ability is split: Inner Focus on 96.6%, Justified on 3% and Steadfast on 0.5%.
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
Lucario is number 448 in the National Dex, a Sinnoh Pokémon, Fighting and Steel
with a base stat total of 525 — 64th of the 234 Pokémon
legal in this regulation. Its best stat is Sp. Atk at 115, 26th
in the format; its weakest is Sp. Def at 70, 168th.
It can have Steadfast, Inner Focus and Justified.
The Champions module tiers it UU.
It sits in a 2-stage line: Riolu → Lucario.
Not all of that line is legal in this regulation — Riolu is not.
What gets through
As Fighting and Steel, 3 of the eighteen attacking types do extra damage to it. It
resists 8 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 Lucario 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
- Sneasler — Close Combat (Fighting, ×2), on 99.7% of its sets
- Staraptor-Mega — Close Combat (Fighting, ×2), on 100% of its sets
- Delphox-Mega — Heat Wave (Fire, ×2), on 99.5% of its sets
Speed and weight
At level 50 with a boosting nature and full investment, Lucario reaches
156 Speed; left uninvested with a neutral nature it sits at
110. 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 54 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
Lucario learns 118 moves in the Champions data.
69 of them do damage, across 17 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 Focus Punch at 150 base power.
It also has priority: Upper Hand at +3, Extreme Speed at +2 and Feint at +2.
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.
