Pokemon Legends: Z-A added a bunch of powerful new Mega Evolutions to the series, and one former world champion reckons one 'mon in particular has the potential to dominate the meta in upcoming competitive-focused game, Pokemon Champions.
The Mega in question is Mega Excadrill, which buffs an already powerful Ground/Steel type with higher attack power, speed, and defense. Speaking in a recent video, 2016 Pokemon World Championships winner Wolfe "Wolfey" Glick explains that this superpowered mole might be the next big weapon for competitive players in Pokemon Champions. Champions is a battle-focused game that's essentially a spiritual successor to Pokemon Stadium, and crucially, it's the upcoming hub for official VGC tournaments (a totally new move for the series, which normally sees tournaments take place in the latest mainline games like Pokemon Scarlet and Violet).
As Wolfey states, regular 'ol Excadrill is "one of the best Pokemon of all time," and "has a history of being an incredible Pokemon in competitive play," and now, its new Mega Evolution is here to make it an even bigger threat. For a start, it grants a significant 30-point boost to its base attack (increased to 165) and a 15-point boost to its speed, bringing it up to 103, which makes it even faster than Garchomp. Even if you're not a competitive player, anyone who's played Diamond, Pearl, Platinum, or the Gen 4 remakes will know full well why that's such a terrifying prospect (looking at you, Cynthia).
On top of that, 40 extra points of defense make it surprisingly bulky, and it also gets, uh, 15 more points in special attack, which actually isn't particularly useful for Excadrill at all, so don't worry about that bit.
The thing is, though, Mega Excadrill is currently only usable in Pokemon Legends: Z-A, the first and only non-spin-off Pokemon game with a real-time combat system. As part of the other sweeping changes to the usual Pokemon formula to make real-time battles work, aside from a couple of exceptions (like Aegislash's Stance Change), Legends: Z-A removes Pokemon traditional abilities.
In the turn-based battles we've been used to in the years gone by, abilities are a massive part of what makes a Pokemon good or viable in competitive play – for example, one of Excadrill's traditional abilities, Sand Rush, makes it particularly great when paired with Tyranitar in double battles, since the latter's ability to set up the Sandstorm weather effect means Excadrill's speed can be doubled thanks to its own innate skill.
Pokemon Champions is set to use the series' traditional turn-based combat, and offer returning battle 'gimmicks' like Mega Evolution, Terastalization, and Z-Moves. Presumably, this will be where we find out the abilities of all the new Mega Evolutions introduced in Z-A, and Wolfey suspects that when it comes to Mega Excadrill's true competitive potential, "a lot will come down to its ability, whether it keeps Sand Rush, or it gets something worse, or maybe something even better. But I think Mega Excadrill has the potential to run the metagame in Pokemon Champions."
For now, we'll have to wait and see – Pokemon Champions still doesn't have a release date beyond a vague 2026 window, but its existence isn't just exciting for competitive players. As Wolfey has previously theorized, thanks to giving the competitive scene what's essentially its own dedicated space, dividing it from the main series titles, Game Freak may be given more freedom to focus on its single-player experience in its other games, which itself demands very different optimizations to the balance required for a thriving competitive game. As he once put it, Champions could "change the way that Pokemon operates forever."
