Thirteen of M-B’s fifteen Megas are held less than the day they arrived

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Regulation M-B added fifteen Mega Evolutions and four months of argument about which of them were any good. There is a way to check. Every ranked team carries the item each Pokemon is holding, so the ladder has been quietly recording how many players actually bother with the stone — and thirteen of the fifteen are bothered with less now than when they arrived. The two going down fastest are Barbaracle and Dragalge, each given up by about a fifth of the few players who still bring them.

Seasons M-3 to M-5 · doubles · 15 Mega Evolutions across 16 stones · read 5 September 2026

Regulation M-B is three seasons: M-3, M-4 and M-5. M-3 and M-4 are each season’s final reading, taken after it closed. M-5 opened on 5 August and closes on the 9th of this month, so the column marked today is a season still being played with four days left in it — the last reading M-B will get, near enough, but not the final one.

What M-B actually handed out

Twenty-two Pokémon joined the ranked ladder when season M-3 opened, and fifteen Mega Evolutions came with them. The two lists are not the same list, which is why these arguments keep sliding between the Pokémon and its Mega as if they were one thing. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they are nowhere near.

Fourteen of the twenty-two newcomers got a stone. The fifteenth Mega went to Raichu, which was already ranked in M-A — and got two stones rather than one, which is why sixteen stones cover fifteen Megas. The other eight arrivals got no Mega at all: Annihilape, Gholdengo, Grimmsnarl, Houndstone, Musharna, Overqwil, Qwilfish and Vileplume.

The ranking the game publishes is a list of Pokémon, not of formes, so it cannot tell a Mega apart from the base form on its own. The item column can. When 99% of Mawile is holding a Mawilite, the rank of Mawile is the rank of the Mega; when 57% of Malamar is holding a Malamarite, it is not.

How often the stone is actually held

Of every copy of that Pokémon on the ranked ladder, the share carrying its M-B stone, on the current reading. Raichu is listed once, on the stone it actually uses; the other one is further down this page.

Share of that Pokémon holding its M-B Mega stone

  1. Mega Mawile: 99% (rank 37)
  2. Mega Pyroar: 96% (rank 85)
  3. Mega Staraptor: 93.2% (rank 10)
  4. Mega Falinks: 92% (rank 191)
  5. Mega Eelektross: 88.1% (rank 86)
  6. Mega Swampert: 87.1% (rank 20)
  7. Mega Metagross: 86.8% (rank 33)
  8. Mega Sceptile: 86.7% (rank 67)
  9. Mega Raichu Y: 85.9% (rank 12)
  10. Mega Scrafty: 82.8% (rank 73)
  11. Mega Blaziken: 75.4% (rank 50)
  12. Mega Barbaracle: 66.6% (rank 198)
  13. Mega Dragalge: 64.6% (rank 126)
  14. Mega Scolipede: 59% (rank 155)
  15. Mega Malamar: 57% (rank 76)

The rank beside each row is the Pokemon, not the Mega — the game does not rank formes. The lower the share, the less those two things mean the same thing.

Only two of the sixteen gained ground

Staraptor is one. Its stone was on 78.5% of them at the end of M-3 and is on 93.2% now, a gain of 14.7 points and the largest move in either direction. The other is the Raichunite Y, from 78.6% to 85.9%. Every other stone M-B shipped is held less often today than when its debut season closed.

Most of those falls are small enough to ignore. The Mawilite lost four tenths of a point and the Falinksite one; nothing follows from either. Four are not small: Barbaracle down 19.7 points, Dragalge down 19.2, Malamar down 10.6 and Swampert down 9.5.

Take the falls one at a time and most of them prove nothing. Line them up and the direction is hard to miss: counting each Mega once, 13 of the 15 lost share and 2 gained. If a stone were as likely to gain as to lose, a split that lopsided turns up about once in 135 tries.

What the ladder gave back

Percentage points of stone share lost between the end of season M-3 and today, for the ten that lost more than five. The two that gained are not in this list, and neither is the Raichunite X, which never had share to lose.

Percentage points of stone share lost since M-3

  1. Mega Barbaracle: 19.7 (86.3 → 66.6)
  2. Mega Dragalge: 19.2 (83.8 → 64.6)
  3. Mega Malamar: 10.6 (67.6 → 57.0)
  4. Mega Swampert: 9.5 (96.6 → 87.1)
  5. Mega Scolipede: 8.4 (67.4 → 59.0)
  6. Mega Blaziken: 7.4 (82.8 → 75.4)
  7. Mega Sceptile: 7.2 (93.9 → 86.7)
  8. Mega Eelektross: 6.1 (94.2 → 88.1)
  9. Mega Scrafty: 5.6 (88.4 → 82.8)
  10. Mega Metagross: 5.3 (92.1 → 86.8)

Three more fell by under four points — the Pyroarite, the Falinksite and the Mawilite — which is nothing, and they are left out rather than drawn as bars. Two stones are missing because they went the other way: the Staraptite gained 14.7 points and the Raichunite Y gained 7.3.

Raichu got two stones and the ladder picked one

Raichu is the one Pokémon M-B handed a choice of Mega to, and it is the clearest result on this page. The Raichunite Y is on 85.9% of them. The Raichunite X is on 7.9%. That is eleven to one, and it has been lopsided all regulation — the X stone read 9.8% in M-3, 11.4% in M-4 and 7.9% now, against a Y that has climbed the whole way.

None of which means the X form is bad, and this page cannot tell you whether it is — nothing in the capture measures whether anybody was right. What it shows is that the players who gave it a go in M-4 have mostly stopped. The question was live a season ago. It is not live now.

It is worth putting Charizard beside it. Its stones came in an earlier regulation, so it is not part of the count above, but it is the only other Pokémon in this game with two of them — and the ladder has answered it the same way, harder: 93.6% Y against 4.9% X. The game has offered a choice of Mega twice. Both times the ladder took one form and left the other under a tenth of the Pokémon.

A stone everybody holds is not a good Mega

It would be easy to read that table as a power ranking. Don’t — look at the two ends of it.

Mawile has the highest share of any M-B stone, 99.0%, and has fallen from rank 24 to rank 37 over the same period. Malamar has the lowest, 57.0%, and is the only one of the twenty-two arrivals to have climbed more than seven places — 86 to 76. The Pokémon whose Mega is close to compulsory is losing ground; the one whose Mega is close to optional is gaining it.

What the share measures is whether the Pokémon has any reason to exist without the stone. Nobody brings a base Mawile, so its share is 99% and its rank is the Mega’s rank. Plenty of people bring a base Malamar — it is a Trick Room Pokémon first and a Mega second — so 43% of its ranking belongs to something this report is not about. So as a verdict on the Mega, the column is worthless. What it does tell you is how much of that Pokémon’s rank you are entitled to put down to the Mega at all, and nothing else in the capture will.

Swampert is the one this actually settles an argument about. It sits between the two extremes and it is moving: the stone was on 96.6% of them in M-3 and is on 87.1% now, so the share playing it without one has gone from about three in a hundred to about thirteen. Those are not stragglers, either — the base form is mostly holding Leftovers, which is somebody’s deliberate build rather than an empty slot. People who say Swampert is the winner of the regulation and people who say it is a fraud are, increasingly, talking about two different Pokémon.

What this settles, and what it does not

Two of the regulation’s louder verdicts survive contact with the numbers. Barbaracle is rank 198 of 235 and a third of the few who bring it no longer bother with the stone, which is about as close to forgotten as this ladder records. Qwilfish, which got no Mega, is rank 224 — the least played arrival of the twenty-two.

Eelektross is the one worth restating, because everybody has the outcome right and the reason wrong. Its stone is still on 88.1% of them; almost nobody is bringing it as a base form and deciding against the Mega. The Mega is the entire point and the point stopped working — it fell from rank 48 to rank 86 with its stone still on. That is a different failure from Barbaracle’s, and the two get filed together.

Metagross gets called the disappointment of the batch and sits at rank 33 with 86.8% of them holding the stone, which is inside the top 15% of the roster. It is a fall — it debuted at 18 — but a Pokémon at 33 is not one the ladder has stopped playing, and the gap between how it gets talked about and where it actually sits says more about what people expected than about what happened.

Nothing in the capture suggests people soured on the Mega. Nearly nine in ten still clip the stone on, and the eighth of Metagross that does not is largely on Leftovers — a built base form, not an afterthought. Both halves of it get played. What changed is what they have to get past.

The capture keeps the moves a Pokémon is beaten by, and Metagross’s list is top-heavy in a way most are not. Heat Wave alone accounts for 11.2% of everything that beats it, nearly double the next move on the list; the capture does not record who threw it, but Charizard is rank 9 and 93.6% of it is the Y form. Add Kingambit’s two signature moves, Sucker Punch and Kowtow Cleave, and they come to 9.2% between them, from the Pokémon ranked first. One fire move and one dark Pokémon are involved in about a fifth of every loss Metagross takes.

The companion piece to this one is A debut rank is a ceiling, not a floor, which takes the same twenty-two arrivals and follows their ranking rather than their items. This page is the other half: what the ranking cannot see.

Method and limits