Five of M-C’s six stones were taken at once. The sixth split Garchomp in two.

· MetaRoll

Regulation M-C brought six new Mega stones to Champions on 9 September. Seven days later, five of them are held by between 80.9% and 99.1% of the Pokémon that can hold them, which is what a Mega stone normally does: it is free, and there is nothing else to put in the slot. The sixth, Garchompite Z, is on 42.5%, and the reason is not that it is a bad stone. It is the only one of the six that takes a type away from its holder, and the type it takes is the one its best move is made of: Earthquake wins more of Garchomp’s games than any other move it carries.

The six Regulation M-C Mega stones · doubles · the ranked ladder as published at 07:46 UTC on 16 September 2026, and the damage calculator on this site

Two kinds of number on this page. Every uptake, moveset, nature, spread and win share is the ladder’s own, read at 07:46 UTC on 16 September 2026, with Season M-5’s figures taken from its final reading on 8 September 2026. Every damage figure and every Speed is this site’s calculator, run on the builds the ladder publishes and frozen here.

What landed

Regulation M-C opened on 9 September 2026 and took the ranked roster from 235 Pokémon to 262 — twenty-seven arrivals, and nothing dropped out. Six new Mega stones came with it, and they are not six of a kind.

Three went to Pokémon that were not on the M-5 ladder at all. Golisopod, Salamence and Baxcalibur arrived with their stones already on them, and there is no before to read them against. The other three went to Pokémon that were already ranked and already had a Mega stone of their own: Absol, Lucario and Garchomp each got a second one, a Z stone. Those three are the measurable ones, because Season M-5 has a final reading that says exactly what each of them was the week before.

This site wrote about the Z stones before they were playable — three pages arguing from the calculator about what each one would do. This is what the ladder did with them.

How many took each stone

A Mega stone costs its holder the held-item slot and nothing else, so the number to expect here is close to everybody. Five of the six are.

Share of that Pokémon holding its new stone

  1. Mega Golisopod: 99.1% (Golisopite)
  2. Mega Salamence: 98.4% (Salamencite)
  3. Mega Absol Z: 98.2% (Absolite Z)
  4. Mega Lucario Z: 95.7% (Lucarionite Z)
  5. Mega Baxcalibur: 80.9% (Baxcalibrite)
  6. Mega Garchomp Z: 42.5% (Garchompite Z)

Seven days in. Five of the six are where a free item with no rival for the slot should be. The sixth is not, and the gap is what the rest of this page is about.

Three of the six are second stones

Absol finished Season M-5 177th of 235. Lucario finished 83rd. Garchomp finished 2nd. Seven days into M-C, on a ladder of 262, Absol is 47th, Lucario 27th and Garchomp 10th.

All three walked away from the stone they already had. Absolite was on 43.6% of Absol in M-5 and is on 0.2% now. Lucarionite was on 69.1% and is on 1.9%. Garchompite was on 7.1% and is on 1.8%. In every case the old stone emptied out; in two of the three the new one filled up.

That 7.1% is worth stopping on, because it rules out the easy reading of this page. The ordinary Mega Garchomp keeps Dragon/Ground and adds forty Attack — on paper the right stone for a Pokémon that was 95.3% physical, in a season it finished 2nd. Almost nobody took it. Garchompite Z, the stone that suits that set least, is on six times as many. Whatever 42.5% is measuring, it is not a stone being refused.

A stone is a moveset, not a stat line

Set the three Z stones against what their holders played in M-5 and the same thing happens each time. The stone rewrites the moveset, and the players follow it exactly as far as the moves let them.

Absol is Dark. Mega Absol Z is Dark and Ghost. In M-5 it played Sucker Punch, Close Combat, Night Slash and Knock Off, with Shadow Claw down on 10.6%. Now Shadow Claw is on 72.6% and Night Slash on 90.5%; Knock Off has left the list and Sucker Punch has fallen to 12.7%. The species moved onto the type the stone handed it, and never had to leave the physical side to do it.

Lucario is Fighting and Steel, and so is Mega Lucario Z. That stone changes no type at all; it changes the side: Special Attack goes up by fifty and Attack comes down by ten. In M-5 Lucario was genuinely mixed — 54.8% physical by nature, 33.4% special — and its list was three physical moves and Aura Sphere. Now it is 95.5% special: Close Combat, Meteor Mash and Bullet Punch have all gone, and Aura Sphere is on 95.2% with Flash Cannon beside it. An entire species changed sides in a week.

Neither of those asks anything hard. Absol kept its side and gained a type. Lucario kept its types and moved to a side it was already on a third of the time, with a special movepool waiting. 98.2% and 95.7% took them.

The other three ask even less, and two of them ask nothing at all. Baxcalibrite adds 30 Attack and changes no type, which is a stone with no question in it — there is no set to rethink, only a bigger number, and 80.9% took it. Salamencite raises both attacking stats by ten and changes no type either, and what it really hands over is Aerilate: the Normal moves Salamence already carried land as Flying and land harder. Golisopite is the only one of the three that trades, Bug/Water for Bug/Steel, and the next section counts what that trade cost. 99.1% took it, the highest share of the six.

None of the three had a Season M-5 to be read against, because none of them was ranked in it. What can be said about them is what they do now, which is the card at the top of this page: Mega Golisopod answers Incineroar with the Bug its stone left it, Mega Baxcalibur kills Sneasler with Ground rather than with the Ice the stone is about, and Mega Salamence kills the Pokémon that kills it.

The one stone that takes a type away

Garchomp is Dragon and Ground. Mega Garchomp Z is pure Dragon. It is the only one of the six that subtracts a type and puts nothing back, and it asks for the other attacking side at the same time — Attack stays at exactly 130, while Special Attack goes from 80 to 141.

The ladder publishes what each Pokémon wins with, and that is where the cost can be counted rather than argued. Earthquake is the top of Garchomp’s list at 26.0% of its recorded wins, ahead of Draco Meteor at 11.3%. It is a Ground move, on a Pokémon the stone stops being Ground.

The arithmetic is checkable on a hit nobody plays. Put the stone on the played physical set and change nothing else — same Jolly nature, same spread, the same 130 Attack either way — and Earthquake into Sneasler falls from 159.2 – 188.5% to 81.5 – 96.8%, while Dragon Claw into the same target falls from 85.4 – 101.9% to 65.6 – 78.3%. Dragon Claw loses about a quarter, which is the Life Orb the stone displaces. Earthquake loses about half: the Life Orb, and on top of it the STAB that went when Garchomp stopped being Ground. The same two ratios hold across all ten Pokémon on Garchomp’s own Beats list.

Compare Golisopod, which also loses a type: Bug/Water becomes Bug/Steel. Its wins come from Leech Life at 52.8%, which is Bug and untouched, and Iron Head at 21.4%, which the stone has just given STAB to. The Water it gave up is carrying Liquidation at 6.2%. So the type Golisopite removed was carrying under a fifteenth of that Pokémon’s wins and the type it added carries over a fifth, and 99.1% hold it. The type Garchompite Z removes is over a quarter of Garchomp’s, and nothing it adds is doing that work — and 42.5% hold it.

What each of the six does to what answers it

The card at the top of this page is all six of them, each against the Pokémon its own published matchups name as beating it, and both sides on the build the ladder actually plays. Six pairings rather than a ranking: they answer six different questions and the figures are not comparable with one another.

The three that arrived with their stones on have no M-5 to be read against, so the card is where they are read. Mega Golisopod answers Incineroar with Leech Life at 52 – 61.4%, which is what 94.4% of them carry: Golisopite rewrites the STAB from Bug/Water to Bug/Steel, and Bug survives the trade. The Water does not: the stone spent that slot on a Steel move, which Incineroar shrugs off at 25.7 – 30.7%. Incineroar is also the only target on this card that spends its points on defence, which is why this is the one row of the six that does not kill.

Mega Baxcalibur kills Sneasler at 142.7 – 168.2%, and not with the Ice the stone is about: High Horsepower is Ground, doubly effective on Poison, where Ice is halved by the Fighting half. And Mega Salamence kills the Pokémon that kills it, which is the one pairing here that runs both ways.

That pair is the only place on this card where the figures decide nothing. Mega Garchomp Z does 165.1 – 195.3% to Mega Salamence, and Mega Salamence does 129.7 – 153.5% back. Both kill outright, so the Speeds settle it: 203 Modest against 189 Timid. The stone that costs Earthquake its STAB is what gets there first.

The two Z stones that changed a side land at opposite ends of the card. Mega Absol Z is 47th on the ladder and hits hardest of the six, 198.6 – 233.1% into Mega Gardevoir with the Ghost its stone added. Read that as the stone widening what it can kill rather than making the kill possible — the Dark it already had does 99.3 – 116.6% into the same target, and kills too. Mega Lucario Z is the softest of the six at 63.1 – 74.5%, and its Aura Sphere softer still at 36.9%: Fighting is halved by the Poison half of Sneasler, so the side 95.5% of the species moved onto is the wrong one for this particular answer. That is one target, not a verdict on the stone.

One name, two Pokémon

The ladder publishes Garchomp’s thirty most used spreads. The top three are not variations on a theme: two of them build to hit with Attack and one with Special Attack, and the split in them is close to the split in the item slot.

What the stone does buy

None of that is an argument against Garchompite Z. It is an argument against putting it on the physical set, which is what most of Garchomp still is. What the stone buys does not appear in an Attack column at all.

It buys two things, and both are why Garchomp Z sits at both ends of the same pairing on the card.

Speed. The played no-stone Garchomp runs at 169, slower than Sneasler at 172 and Mega Salamence at 189 — the 1st and the 3rd of the ladder. Mega Garchomp Z runs at 203 Modest and 223 Timid, faster than both.

What it stops taking. Pure Dragon halves the Ice weakness that Dragon/Ground carried at four times. Mega Baxcalibur’s Icicle Crash does 222.7 – 265.9% to the no-stone Garchomp and 123.2 – 145.9% to the Z, which kills either body and takes barely half as much doing it. Levitate then makes it immune to Ground outright: Rillaboom’s High Horsepower does 33.0 – 38.9% to one and nothing at all to the other. The stone that costs Earthquake its STAB also makes its holder immune to everybody else’s.

What it costs besides the type. Ten points of Defence, and the item. Sneasler’s Close Combat goes from 63.8 – 75.1% to 69.7 – 82.7%.

What to make of it

Five of the six stones were taken by nearly everybody, and what they have in common is that none of them asks its holder to stop doing what it was already doing. Salamencite raises both attacking stats by ten and changes no type. Baxcalibrite adds 30 Attack and changes no type. Absolite Z adds a type. Golisopite trades one for another and comes out ahead on the trade. Lucarionite Z changes the side and leaves both types alone, for a Pokémon that had a special third already.

Garchompite Z is the only one that asks for both at once: attack from the other side, and give up the type the best move is standing on. Two in five Garchomp said yes. The rest kept the Life Orb or the Choice Scarf and go on throwing Earthquake. That is not a stone failing — the stone it replaced managed 7.1% in a season this Pokémon finished 2nd. It is one Pokémon being played as two, and it shows up three times over: in the natures, in the spreads and in the item slot.

Garchomp is 10th now, having finished M-5 2nd, and it is tempting to hang that on the stone. The figures point somewhere else. Rillaboom arrived with this regulation, sits above it, and sets Grassy Terrain on itself — which halves every Ground move aimed at it. Earthquake is 26.0% of Garchomp’s recorded wins and 42.8% of them still carry it, and into Rillaboom it reads 10.6 – 13.0%. Into Sneasler, the Pokémon it finished M-5 behind, the same move is 159.2 – 188.5%.

And it lands on the half of Garchomp that did not take the stone. The Z set throws Draco Meteor, which the terrain does nothing to: 81.6 – 96.1% into that same Rillaboom. What these figures cannot do is rank the causes against one another — four of the Pokémon now above Garchomp arrived with this regulation, and no capture separates one arrival’s effect from another’s. What they can say is which half of Garchomp the new ladder punishes, and it is the half still throwing Earthquake.

Method and limits