Liepard is rank 146 and its favourite partner is rank 10

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A Pokémon at rank 146 whose most frequent teammate is the tenth most-used in the game is not a coincidence of popularity. Liepard is there to lower Mega Staraptor’s stats, because Contrary turns a stat drop into a boost — and the same ability is why only a third of Staraptors max Attack, where seven of the eight comparable attackers manage nine spreads in ten. This is a top-ten Pokémon a third of the ladder is not building as an attacker at all.

Season M-5 · doubles · Mega Staraptor at rank 10 · captured 1 September 2026

One reading, not a window. This is the ladder as it stood on 1 September 2026 — it says how the Staraptors on it are built, and nothing about whether they have been built that way for a week or a season.

What the ability does to the move

Ninety-three per cent of Staraptor hold Staraptite, and the Mega has one ability: Contrary, which reverses every stat change that lands on it. That includes the ones it inflicts on itself.

Close Combat normally drops the user’s Defence and Special Defence by one stage each. On Contrary it raises them. The Mega is Fighting/Flying, so the move is ordinary same-type damage on the way in — and on the way out it leaves Staraptor tougher than it started. 98.7% of them carry it, and it is the move credited in 54.4% of the wins they are recorded for.

Everybody maxes Attack. Staraptor does not.

The share of each Pokémon’s published spreads that push Attack to 30 or more of the 32 it is allowed. The comparison is fast physical attackers, because a slow one has the Speed points spare to spend elsewhere and would not be answering the same question.

Share of published spreads that max Attack

  1. Lycanroc-Dusk: 99.4% (#59)
  2. Weavile: 99.1% (#66)
  3. Meowscarada: 98.9% (#49)
  4. Sneasler: 94.2% (#3)
  5. Talonflame: 94.1% (#35)
  6. Lopunny: 91.8% (#96)
  7. Blaziken: 91.3% (#50)
  8. Garchomp: 75.2% (#2)
  9. Staraptor: 33.8% (#10)

The other eight sit between 75.2% and 99.4%. Staraptor is at 33.8%, and 33.9% of its spreads put five points or fewer into Attack at all.

The seven per cent that are not Mega

One objection to that 34% before going on, because it is the first thing anybody will reach for. Ninety-three per cent of Staraptor hold Staraptite, which leaves 7% that never Mega Evolve, never have Contrary, and have no reason to build around it — and the game publishes spreads per Pokémon, not per item, so those two populations cannot be separated in this reading.

It does not get you there. Even if every one of that 7% were a conventional attacker maxing Attack, it could not account for the gap: 33.9% of published Staraptor spreads put five points or fewer into Attack, and five times the non-Mega share is still a third of the ladder building a top-ten attacker to not attack. The confounder is real and it is far too small to be the explanation.

A teammate that lowers your stats is a teammate that boosts them

Which is where the teammates come in, and they are the half of this nobody else can read. Whimsicott to begin with, because the pairing is real and mutual: Whimsicott is Staraptor’s most common teammate, and Staraptor is Whimsicott’s fifth. Whimsicott runs Prankster 98.4% of the time and Tailwind 96.9%, which is the fastest way to make a 30-Speed-point Staraptor move first.

Two things are worth being precise about, because the obvious guess is wrong in both directions. Tailwind is a side condition, not a stat change, so Contrary does not touch it — it works exactly as it would on anything else. And an ally raising Staraptor’s stats would be actively bad, because Contrary inverts a boost handed over by a teammate just as happily as a drop from its own move.

The play runs the other way. A teammate lowering Staraptor’s stats on purpose is a boost: Charm drops Attack by two stages, so pointed at a Contrary ally it is +2 Attack — and at Prankster priority, before anything else on the field has moved. Fake Tears does the same for Special Defence. A quarter of Whimsicott carry Charm.

Liepard has no other reason to be there

Whimsicott is weak evidence on its own. It is the fifth most-used Pokémon in the game and it partners everything; Staraptor sits fifth on its list because Staraptor sits on a third of everybody’s list.

Liepard is the evidence. It is rank 146, it runs Prankster 96.3% of the time, it is the heaviest Fake Tears user on the ladder at 22.8% and the second-heaviest Charm user at 23.0% — and its single most common teammate is not its fifth or its eighth. It is Staraptor, at number one. A Pokémon outside the top 140 whose most frequent partner is the tenth most-used Pokémon in the game is not a coincidence of popularity; it is a Pokémon being brought for a job.

Seven Pokémon on the whole ladder carry Charm or Fake Tears. Five of the seven keep a Contrary Pokémon among their ten most common teammates, against a ladder-wide rate of 32.8%. The two that do not are Ninetales and Aromatisse, and neither has Prankster to make the trick worth a turn. With seven cases that is a pattern rather than a proof, but it is the pattern the play would leave.

Where the points go instead

Into HP. A quarter of published Staraptor spreads — 25.1% — max it; the eight attackers above manage between 0.4% and 4.8%. Read this as the consequence rather than a second finding: HP is where spare points go on this ladder whoever is spending them, and a Staraptor that has skipped Attack has around thirty of them spare. The Attack figure is the one doing the work.

Two things this is not evidence of, both of which look convincing until they are checked. Staraptor invests essentially nothing in Defence or Special Defence — 0.1 and 0.7 points of 66 — but so does every attacker on that list, because maxing two stats spends 64 of the budget and leaves two. And Close Combat at 98.7% is not a Contrary fingerprint either: Sneasler runs the same move at 98.5% with no Contrary in sight.

The same Pokémon, built opposite ways

Staraptor’s four most-used spreads against Sneasler’s three, drawn as what they are: 66 points, split. Sneasler argues about where two spare points go. Staraptor argues about whether it is an attacker.

Roost is the giveaway

If the defensive reading were a minority eccentricity, the recovery move would be rare. It is the opposite: Staraptor is the heaviest Roost user on the ladder at 56.4%, against a mean of 22.7% across the eight Pokémon that can run it. The next four are Corviknight, Altaria, Skarmory and Toucannon — bulky Flying types, which is what you would expect a Roost list to look like.

A top-ten offensive Mega out-Roosting the bulky Flying types is the shape of the thing. Close Combat supplies the defences, Roost supplies the HP to put behind them, and the pair of them is a wincon that happens to be spelled like an attack.

Is it really the ability?

The ladder can give Contrary to three Pokémon, and two of them get to choose it against a real alternative. Both take it almost unanimously: Serperior runs Contrary over Overgrow 99.2% of the time, and Malamar takes it over Suction Cups and Infiltrator 98.4% of the time.

Each then pairs it with exactly one self-lowering move, at a rate nothing else on the ladder approaches. Serperior runs Leaf Storm at 98.6% where the ten Pokémon that can run it average 32.2%. Malamar runs Superpower at 91.9% against an average of 32.8%. Staraptor cannot choose — Contrary arrives with the stone — but it is the same shape, and it is why the split in its spreads is worth reading as a disagreement about the ability rather than noise.

What to do with it

If you are building one, the useful thing here is that there is no consensus to copy. The ladder has two answers and they are not close: max Attack and swing Close Combat as an attack, or skip Attack almost entirely and use the same move as a setup turn that happens to do damage. Pick the job first and the spread follows from it — copying the single most popular build gets you the first answer without telling you the second one exists.

If you are facing one, do not read the Mega as an attacker on sight. A third of them are not, Close Combat leaves whichever it is tougher than it started, and Roost at 56.4% means a turn spent chipping it is a turn it can take back.

And the teammate half of this generalises past Staraptor. A Prankster ally holding Charm or Fake Tears is +2 on any Contrary Pokémon at priority, before anything else on the field has moved; seven Pokémon on this ladder carry one of those moves and five of them already stand beside a Contrary partner.

Three reports lead into this one. Champions Stat Point spreads is the general case — how the top thirty divide 66 points when no ability is playing tricks on them; Champions debut ranks covers where Staraptor came from, since it is one of the twenty-two that arrived in M-3 and the only one that reached the top ten and stayed; and Champions ladder movement has the rank it has been holding while this was written.

Method and limits