SP, explained: what replaced EVs and IVs in Pokémon Champions

If you are coming from mainline VGC, the first thing to unlearn is the arithmetic. Champions did not rename EVs. It replaced them with something simpler, and most of the habits built over a decade of 252/4 spreads do not carry over.

The one rule that matters

One SP adds exactly one point to the final stat.

That is the whole mechanic. There is no divide-by-four, no rounding threshold to land on, no leftover points to sweep into a junk stat. If you put 12 SP into Speed, the Speed stat goes up by 12.

Under EVs, four points bought one stat point at level 100 and the conversion at level 50 produced the familiar rule that spreads should be multiples of eight, with odd values wasting effort. None of that exists here. Every point you spend is spent.

The budget

Two limits apply at once:

• 32 SP maximum in any single stat
• 66 SP total across all six

The second is the one that shapes teambuilding. Three maxed stats would need 96 points, so the cap forces a genuine choice: two stats at 32 leaves you 2 points for everything else.

That is a much tighter constraint than the EV budget, which comfortably funded two maxed stats and a meaningful third investment. In Champions, the third stat is a rounding error unless you give up something real elsewhere.

Where nature applies

Nature multiplies the stat after SP has been added — not before, and not on a separate track.

This is a change worth stating plainly, because under EVs the nature multiplier applied to a total that EV investment had already moved in steps, and the interaction produced the well-known breakpoints people memorised. Here the order is simple and the arithmetic is monotonic: add SP, then multiply.

Nature is still ×1.1 for a boosted stat, ×0.9 for a hindered one, ×1.0 otherwise.

What is simply gone

• IVs. Fixed at 31 across the board. No breeding for a spread, no Hidden Power juggling, and no deliberately-zero Attack IV to reduce confusion damage.
• The 252/4 convention. It describes a system that is not in this game.
• Level variance. Ranked play is level 50.

The formula

For anyone checking their own numbers:

HP    = floor((2·Base + 31) · L / 100) + L + 10 + SP
Other = floor( ( floor((2·Base + 31) · L / 100) + 5 + SP ) · Nature )

Nature ∈ {0.9, 1.0, 1.1}    SP ∈ [0, 32]    ΣSP ≤ 66    IV ≡ 31    L ≡ 50 in ranked

Worked through Garchomp at level 50:

Shedinja is special-cased to 1 HP, as it always has been.

Why we are confident this is right

This mechanic is widely described as unsettled. The most prominent open dataset for Champions states in its own documentation that "the exact mapping from SP (0-32) to the formula's EV equivalent is still being community-verified" — a framing that is wrong twice over, because it is not unverified and SP is not an EV equivalent at all.

We checked it rather than repeating it. Two independently written calculators implement the identical arithmetic, and both were read in source rather than inferred from their output:

• damekei.com, a Japanese calculator, in a 713-byte compiled bundle
• the NCP VGC Damage Calculator, in a separate 4.5 KB jQuery module

The two share no code and are written in different styles, and their arithmetic matches exactly. Every stat rendered by damekei's default state reproduces from the formula above with no residual — twelve of twelve values.

A third, independent line of evidence: Smogon's Regulation M-B speed-tier reference builds every row on 32 Speed investment, which is the community's own reference table agreeing on the per-stat cap.

Credit where it is due: damekei published a correct implementation first, and in public.

The one thing we cannot source

We have not found a first-party statement of the 66-point total budget. Every calculator we examined enforces it, three separate language communities document it, and no source we checked disagrees — but "every third party implements it" is not the same as "the game says so", and the difference is worth naming rather than smoothing over.

If you are optimising to the last point, verify the total against the game before trusting it.

Putting it to work

The practical consequence of the 66-point cap is that spreads are now a real optimisation problem rather than a convention. You are choosing which two stats matter and accepting that the rest are untouched, and the answer depends on which speed benchmarks you need to clear and which attacks you need to survive.

That is a solvable question, and it is what our EV Optimizer is for — give it the benchmarks and it will spend the 66 points for you.