What it does on the ladder
Ninetales-Alola appears on 6.5% of Regulation M-B teams, which
is 25th of the 282 Pokémon with enough games to measure.
The move it almost always carries is Blizzard, on 96.6% of sets.
The item is usually Never-Melt Ice at 52.8%.
The ability is split: Snow Warning on 99.4% and Snow Cloak on 0.6%.
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-Alola is number 38 in the National Dex, a Kanto Pokémon, Ice and Fairy
with a base stat total of 505 — 108th of the 234 Pokémon
legal in this regulation. Its best stat is Speed at 109, 28th
in the format; its weakest is Attack at 67, 183rd.
It can have Snow Cloak and Snow Warning.
The Champions module tiers it UU.
It sits in a 2-stage line: Vulpix-Alola → Ninetales-Alola.
Not all of that line is legal in this regulation — Vulpix-Alola is not.
What gets through
As Ice and Fairy, 4 of the eighteen attacking types do extra damage to it, and Steel lands for quadruple. It
resists 3 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 Ninetales-Alola takes extra damage from.
- Kingambit — Iron Head (Steel, ×4), on 67.8% of its sets
- Incineroar — Flare Blitz (Fire, ×2), on 91.2% of its sets
- Garchomp — Rock Slide (Rock, ×2), on 75.9% of its sets
- Charizard-Mega-Y — Heat Wave (Fire, ×2), on 99.2% of its sets
- Sneasler — Dire Claw (Poison, ×2), on 63% of its sets
- Archaludon — Flash Cannon (Steel, ×4), on 94.9% 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 Speed at 109 of the 2.
It has the lowest Attack at 67.
The others are Ninetales.
Speed and weight
At level 50 with a boosting nature and full investment, Ninetales-Alola reaches
177 Speed; left uninvested with a neutral nature it sits at
129. Invested, it outruns 15 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-Alola learns 93 moves in the Champions data.
46 of them do damage, across 10 of the eighteen
types, and 16 share a type with it and so get the same-type bonus.
Its hardest-hitting same-type move is Blizzard at 110 base power, though the biggest number in the pool is Giga Impact at 150.
It also has priority: Ice Shard 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.
