Spend enough time in Pokemon Champions ranked lobbies and you will see the same four Pokemon over and over. Incineroar using Intimidate and Fake Out. Whimsicott setting up Tailwind. Sneasler or Mega Charizard Y closing out the match. The meta calcified fast, and most players are running near-identical teams trying to outplay each other with the same toolkit.
Here's the thing: that kind of groupthink creates a massive blind spot. And one player spent 12 hours exploiting it.
Why the current Pokemon Champions meta is a sitting duck
Pokemon Champions launched with a narrower roster than veterans of the VGC format are used to, and the community zeroed in on optimal picks almost immediately. According to the game's own Battle Data, Incineroar sits at the top of the most-used list in double battles, and the Tailwind-into-Charizard combo has become so common that opponents can practically predict your team before the match begins.
The problem with everyone running the same strategy is that everyone also knows exactly how to beat it. Counter-teams were inevitable. What nobody expected was a squad of deliberately slow, bulky Pokemon turning that speed advantage into a liability.
The Slow Boys: a Trick Room team built to punish the meta
The squad, affectionately called the Slow Boys, is built around a single first-turn play: get Cofagrigus on the field and activate Trick Room. Under Trick Room, speed priority flips, meaning the slowest Pokemon on the field move first. Every Tailwind your opponent sets up to double their team's speed suddenly works against them, making their fastest attackers go last instead.
Cofagrigus sits at just the 123rd most-used Pokemon in double battles right now, so most players have never had to think about how to deal with it. Less experienced players may not even recognize what Trick Room does until it is already too late.
The Ghost-typing is not just flavor, either. It makes Cofagrigus immune to Fake Out entirely, which is the single most common disruption tool in the current meta. Opponents burning their lead turn on a flinch that never lands is a significant tempo loss.
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Trick Room reverses speed priority for 5 turns. Under its effect, Pokemon with lower Speed stats move before faster ones, making slow, bulky builds suddenly dominant.
How the roster is constructed
Cofagrigus anchors the strategy, but the supporting cast does the heavy lifting once Trick Room is active.
- Hisuian Goodra (nicknamed Oopy Goopy) uses Knock Off to strip held items and Heavy Slam to punish Fairy-types like Whimsicott, with Draco Meteor for serious damage output
- Galarian Slowbro sets up Calm Mind to stack Special Attack and Special Defense, then sweeps with Shell Side Arm and Psyshock, the latter hitting Sneasler particularly hard
- Tyranitar brings Sandstream to erase weather conditions like harsh sunlight, and quad-effective Rock-type moves that make Mega Charizard Y a much less scary proposition
- Drampa runs Cloud Nine to neutralize weather, with Hyper Voice hitting both opposing Pokemon simultaneously and Thunderbolt for rain-setters like Pelipper
- Appletun (a shiny pulled from the game's gacha system) walls opponents with Leech Seed chip damage, Sitrus Berry heals amplified by the Ripen ability, and Recycle to keep replenishing that berry indefinitely
What most players miss is that this lineup does not need to be flashy. The goal is to survive long enough for Trick Room to do its work, then let the offensive members clean up against a team that has already burned its best options.
The forfeit parade
The results have been striking. Multiple consecutive forfeits from opponents running standard meta teams, with the concessions coming before matches even reach their conclusion. The pattern points to something specific: players deeply familiar with the Incineroar and Whimsicott gameplan are not equipped to adapt mid-match when that gameplan gets flipped on its head.
Trick Room teams are not a new concept in competitive Pokemon, and Champions players running Farigaraf in similar setups have appeared in ranked lobbies too. The difference here is the specific combination of Pokemon chosen, most of which sit far outside the current usage statistics, and the deliberate focus on shutting down the exact tools the meta relies on.
To put the Cofagrigus pick in perspective: at 123rd on the usage list, the vast majority of opponents will have faced it rarely or never. That unfamiliarity is the real weapon.
What this tells us about Pokemon Champions right now
The forfeit count is funny, but the underlying point is worth taking seriously. Pokemon Champions has done a genuine job of lowering the barrier to competitive play, letting players build optimized teams quickly without the traditional grind. The flip side is that accessibility tends to compress the meta faster, since everyone is working from the same pool of information and the same easy access to top-tier picks.
The Slow Boys are a reminder that the current meta has soft spots, and that creativity still pays off when the field is full of identical teams. As the game matures and more Pokemon and items get added, the meta will naturally diversify. For now, anyone willing to put in the research time to build something genuinely different has a real edge.
For players looking to build their own counter-strategies or just find something more interesting to run than the 50th Incineroar team, browse more guides for team-building resources and competitive breakdowns across the Pokemon Champions roster.
