Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s new moves and items, explained

polygon.com:

Some of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s new moves and items have been detailed in a trailer expressly geared toward competitive Pokémon players. It was first shown during the 2022 Pokémon World Championships, and watching a trailer like this with a crowd — especially one full of people who know the ins and outs of Pokémon math and who treat every battle like a chess match — is always exhilarating. The Pokémon Company tailors the Worlds trailers for these players, revealing small mechanics that can have large effects on battle strategy.

But you don’t need to be a competitive player to have fun with new mechanics. Every Pokémon generation gets new stuff, and Scarlet and Violet’s flagship mechanic is the Terastal phenomenon, which was revealed in a previous trailer. Like Mega Evolution or Dynamaxing before it, Terastallizing is the “gimmick” of this generation — a mechanic that all players, not just the most hardcore battlers, will encounter and have to adapt to throughout the game.

Based on the trailer, the Terastal phenomenon is all about messing with your opponent — and even outside of Terastallizing, the new moves and items share that same theme. By shaking things up and keeping trainers on their toes, these new mechanics could give Pokémon with bad battle raps a new lease on life. Here’s how they’ll influence competitive play.

Let’s start with what we already knew: The Terastal phenomenon will allow Pokémon to change types mid-battle to their “Tera Type,” which is inactive until the Pokémon Terastallizes. Each individual Pokémon has its own Tera Type, so one Pikachu could have a different Tera Type than the next, offering some variation and a lot of potential for collectors. The new trailer showed off a few examples —