Win Rate Identifier — full guide

The Win Rate Identifier answers the first team-building question: given the Pokémon I want to play, what should the rest of the team be? It searches every recorded team in the selected format, finds the ones that used your picks, and reports which partners and cores actually won games. This guide walks the page top to bottom.

1. Format Rankings — the lay of the land

The panel at the top ranks every Pokémon in the selected format by usage or win rate. Before building anything, spend a minute here: it tells you what the field looks like and which Pokémon are pulling their weight. The controls that matter most:

Format — the regulation whose games you want to count. Stats do not transfer cleanly between regulations, so make sure this matches the event you are preparing for.
Win rate source — Tournament counts bracketed tournament games, Showdown replays counts ladder games, and Blended mixes both. Tournament data is closer to how tested teams perform; ladder data has far more volume and reflects the broader field.
Window — how far back to look. A short window tracks the current trend; "All time" gives the biggest, most stable sample.
Confidence filter — hides rows whose sample size is too small to mean much. If a number looks too good to be true, check its confidence tier first; it usually is.

2. Team slots — declare your core

Enter one to six Pokémon in the slots. One or two picks is the sweet spot: with a single Pokémon the tool surveys every team that carried it; with two it narrows to teams that ran the pair together. The more you lock in, the smaller (and more specific) the matching sample becomes — that is not a flaw, it is the trade-off between relevance and confidence.

3. "Completes the team" — partner suggestions

This section lists Pokémon that appeared on teams alongside your picks, with how the team's win rate changed when they did. Read each row as three linked facts: the partner, the win rate of teams that added it, and the number of games and teams behind that figure. The Min games and Min teams filters cut the noise floor — raising them trades discovery for reliability. The Megas filter matters in the Champions format because a team effectively gets one Mega slot; use it to search "partners assuming my Mega is decided" versus "potential Mega options."

4. "Discover cores" — start from nothing

Core discovery scans the whole format for the highest-performing combinations of 2–6 Pokémon, independent of what you typed in the slots. Set the group size, minimum games, and a sort order, then press Recompute. The sort options encode different questions:

Win rate — which combinations win most often, full stop.
Lift — which combinations win more than their members' individual records would predict. High lift is the signature of real synergy rather than two individually strong Pokémon standing near each other.
Games — the most battle-tested cores, best for a safe, proven base.
Teams ↑ (underexplored) — strong results spread across few teams: where innovation might still be hiding.

5. Reading the numbers without fooling yourself

Every figure on the page is an observed historical rate, not a prediction. Three habits keep the tool honest:

Respect the sample size. A 56% win rate over 300 games is a real edge; the same number over 20 games is a lead to test. As a rough floor, treat anything under ~100 games as exploratory.
Expect small edges. VGC metagames sit near equilibrium. Partners that add 2–4 percentage points consistently are excellent; anything claiming +15 points on a small sample is almost certainly noise.
Usage is not quality. Very common "default" picks can show mediocre win rates precisely because everyone brings them regardless of fit. Low win rate on a high-usage Pokémon is a fact about the crowd, not a ban recommendation.

6. Hand off to the next tool

When the roster looks right, use "Send team to EV Optimizer" to carry it forward, or take it to the Coverage Optimizer first to check for offensive holes. The intended order of the full workflow is covered in the Guides overview.

Unsure about a term? The glossary defines win rate, lift, cores, and the rest in plain English.