Pokemon Champions, the competitive pocket monster-battling spin-off game announced during the Pokemon Day 2025 livestream, will be released on the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 on April 8.

Champions is completely free to play, but it will be launched alongside an optional paid starter pack bundle. This pack includes extra in-game Pokemon storage, a special battle song and additional in-game currency to recruit Pokemon for battle.

The latest Pokemon game unifies professional-level play under a single battling format, which will be used for the 2026 Pokemon World Championships in August. While a whole host of battling mechanics from past games like Z-Moves and Terastallization haven’t been shown off in any of the promotional materials, Mega Pokemon will be available in Pokemon Champions as soon as the game is released.

We’ve known for a while that Pokemon Champions will largely use Pokemon Home for teambuilding. Pokemon Home is a subscription service that stores Pokemon in the cloud and allows them to be transferred in and out of multiple games, including Pokemon Go, Pokemon Sword and Shield, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet and Pokemon Legends: Z-A.

What we didn’t know is how players without a Pokemon Home subscription would build their teams — and frankly, it looks like a bit of a mess. Free-to-play users will be limited to unlocking one new Pokemon a day from a random pool of available pocket monsters.

These Pokemon can be used for a week before they disappear from the player’s account. It’ll take six days to build a whole team, and by the time a player does so, their first party member will nearly be rotated out. What a hassle.

On the upside, scoring wins against online opponents will reward players with a currency that allows them to unlock multiple Pokemon in a single day — and even keep them permanently. Hopefully, this currency is plentiful enough that Pokemon Home doesn’t feel like a requirement to engage with competitive Pokemon battling in the future.

One of the most exciting parts of the impending release of Pokemon Champions will be seeing how the new Pokemon Legends: Z-A Mega Evolutions fare in classic turn-based Pokemon combat. Legends: Z-A launched with a real-time battle system that pared down complex parts of Pokemon battling in order to create more fluid fights. When these Mega Pokemon come to Pokemon Champions, they’ll receive new abilities that could completely change high-level play.

A recent blog post by The Pokemon Company teased some of these abilities, showing off how Mega Meganium and Mega Feraligatr now have access to harder-hitting grass- and dragon-type moves, but there are many more Mega Pokemon that could gain potentially meta-defining abilities when Pokemon Champions is released in April.

A mobile release of Pokemon Champions with cross-platform multiplayer battling is planned for late 2026, but no official release dates for iOS or Android have been announced yet.