What it does on the ladder
Ninetales appears on 0.32% of Regulation M-B teams, which
is 118th of the 282 Pokémon with enough games to measure.
The move it almost always carries is Heat Wave, on 90% of sets.
The item is usually Choice Scarf at 66.6%.
The ability is split: Drought on 99.9% and Flash Fire on 0.1%.
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
Ninetales is number 38 in the National Dex, a Kanto Pokémon, Fire
with a base stat total of 505 — 109th of the 234 Pokémon
legal in this regulation. Its best stat is Sp. Def at 100, 47th
in the format; its weakest is HP at 73, 148th.
It can have Flash Fire and Drought.
The Champions module tiers it UU.
It sits in a 2-stage line: Vulpix → Ninetales.
Not all of that line is legal in this regulation — Vulpix is not.
What gets through
As Fire, 3 of the eighteen attacking types do extra damage to it. It
resists 6. The board above
has all of it. 5 other legal Pokémon share the same typing and the same board: Torkoal, Arcanine, Typhlosion, Flareon, Simisear.
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 Ninetales takes extra damage from.
- Garchomp — Earthquake (Ground, ×2), on 85.7% of its sets
- Basculegion — Aqua Jet (Water, ×2), on 96.6% of its sets
- Aerodactyl-Mega — Rock Slide (Rock, ×2), on 99.8% of its sets
- Blastoise-Mega — Water Spout (Water, ×2), on 96.4% of its sets
- Swampert-Mega — Wave Crash (Water, ×2), on 97.6% of its sets
- Venusaur — Earth Power (Ground, ×2), on 77% of its sets
Against its own formes
Ninetales has 2 legal formes in this regulation and they share a
typing, so the only thing separating them is the stat line.
This one has the highest Attack at 76 of the 2.
It has the lowest Speed at 100.
The others are Ninetales-Alola.
Speed and weight
At level 50 with a boosting nature and full investment, Ninetales 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 19.9 kg, so Grass Knot and Low Kick hit it for 40 base
power. That is a real consideration in a format where both are common.
Its move pool
Ninetales learns 97 moves in the Champions data.
49 of them do damage, across 8 of the eighteen
types, and 12 share a type with it and so get the same-type bonus.
Its hardest-hitting same-type move is Overheat at 130 base power, though the biggest number in the pool is Giga Impact at 150.
It also has priority: Quick Attack 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.
