What it does on the ladder
Palafin appears on 0.48% of Regulation M-B teams, which
is 100th of the 282 Pokémon with enough games to measure.
The move it almost always carries is Jet Punch, on 90% of sets.
The item is usually Mystic Water at 65.5%.
Every one of them runs Zero to Hero.
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
Palafin is number 964 in the National Dex, a Paldea Pokémon, Water
with a base stat total of 457 — 210th of the 234 Pokémon
legal in this regulation. Its best stat is HP at 100, 30th
in the format; its weakest is Sp. Atk at 53, 204th.
Its only ability is Zero to Hero.
The Champions module tiers it Uber.
It sits in a 2-stage line: Finizen → Palafin.
Not all of that line is legal in this regulation — Finizen is not.
What gets through
As Water, 2 of the eighteen attacking types do extra damage to it. It
resists 4. The board above
has all of it. 8 other legal Pokémon share the same typing and the same board: Milotic, Politoed, Blastoise, Vaporeon, Feraligatr and others.
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 Palafin takes extra damage from.
- Charizard-Mega-Y — Solar Beam (Grass, ×2), on 82.2% of its sets
- Sinistcha — Matcha Gotcha (Grass, ×2), on 97.9% of its sets
- Farigiraf — Thunderbolt (Electric, ×2), on 59.2% of its sets
- Archaludon — Electro Shot (Electric, ×2), on 98.6% of its sets
- Venusaur — Solar Beam (Grass, ×2), on 34.5% of its sets
- Raichu-Mega-Y — Zap Cannon (Electric, ×2), on 98.8% of its sets
Speed and weight
At level 50 with a boosting nature and full investment, Palafin 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 60.2 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
Palafin learns 66 moves in the Champions data.
42 of them do damage, across 11 of the eighteen
types, and 14 share a type with it and so get the same-type bonus.
Its hardest-hitting same-type move is Wave Crash at 120 base power, though the biggest number in the pool is Focus Punch at 150.
It also has priority: Jet Punch at +1 and Aqua Jet 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.
