Seven of the eight best-performing pairs include Archaludon, Pelipper or Politoed. The top pair, Incineroar + Politoed, wins 58.1% of 1,738 games. Rain’s workhorse, Archaludon + Pelipper, is the second-most-brought pair and wins 54.9% across 5,362 games.
The best niche pairs come from fewer hands. Incineroar + Politoed was brought by 330 different players, where the big pairs have thousands. Read the top of this list as a strong signal, not a settled order. Player clustering.
Best pairs by full-reveal win rate, Elo ≥ 1300. Bar: 95% CI. Accent dot and tag: pairs with a rain piece. Pairs need n ≥ 500, CI ≤ ±3 pp and 50+ players.
What 1300 changes
Rillaboom is on 40% of teams. Its on-team win rate slides from 51.9% at all Elo to 49.9% when both players are 1300 or better. Among common species, Excadrill, Salamence, Rillaboom, Sneasler and Milotic lose the most, 1.8 to 2.2 pp each.
The biggest gains go to rarer picks: Maushold-Four climbs +4.3 pp. The likely cause is skill, not strength. Lower on the ladder, players on stock teams beat players on off-meta ones. Above 1300 nearly everyone brings a good team. The skill confound.
Falls
Excadrill−2.252.2 → 50.0 · ≥1300 CI 48.9–51.0 · n 9.3k
Salamence−2.151.7 → 49.6 · ≥1300 CI 48.9–50.2 · n 23k
Rillaboom−2.151.9 → 49.9 · ≥1300 CI 49.3–50.4 · n 32k
Sneasler−2.050.9 → 48.9 · ≥1300 CI 48.4–49.5 · n 29k
Milotic−1.850.8 → 49.0 · ≥1300 CI 48.2–49.8 · n 16k
455055
All Elo Elo ≥ 1300 Largest drops among species on 5%+ of teams.
Climbs
Maushold-Four+4.346.0 → 50.3 · ≥1300 CI 47.4–53.3 · n 1.1k
Sableye+3.247.1 → 50.3 · ≥1300 CI 48.5–52.1 · n 3.0k
Dragapult+2.547.7 → 50.3 · ≥1300 CI 48.8–51.8 · n 4.4k
Whimsicott+2.547.9 → 50.4 · ≥1300 CI 49.4–51.4 · n 9.3k
455055
All Elo Elo ≥ 1300 Largest gains, any usage.
Archaludon is the best common pick
On 17.7% of teams, Archaludon wins 52.2% of games it is in the preview for (95% CI 51.5–52.9). No species on at least 5% of teams does better. When it is actually brought, its full-reveal win rate is 54.1%.
On-team win rate, the six most-used species. Bar: 95% CI.
Archaludon has the highest floor
Even at the low end of its 95% interval, Archaludon wins 51.5% of games it is in the preview for (point estimate 52.2%, n 18,679). Ranking by that lower bound favours win rates that are both high and well sampled.
Top five ranked species by the lower 95% bound of on-team win rate. Number: that lower bound. Bar: 95% CI, dot: win rate.
Every ranked species
Only games where both players were rated 1300 or higher, about 23% of the corpus. Less distorted by skill, but a quarter of the sample, so more rows go thin. Sorted by usage; select a column heading to re-sort. On-team WR counts every game a species was in the team preview. Full-reveal WR counts games it was brought, but only where both sides showed all four, which removes the bias in raw “brought” numbers (why). Mirror games are excluded. 182 rarer species or formes fall below the sample bar and are left out.