The official Pokémon website announced the new season of ranked battles for Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet., Pokémon fans around the world battle it out to be the very best. This season, ranked battles will certainly be interesting. Nintendo announced that the Terastal Pokémon will be allowed to participate in ranked battles. While only Pokémon in the Paldea Pokédex will be able to use this feature, this new in-game mechanic shakes up the order of things in the online competition.

In ranked battles, trainers use Pokémon they bred and train to play competitively against one another. Not knowing what Pokémon an opposing trainer will use, trainers often create a balanced team to compete against every possible opponent they might face. In previous games, a few Pokémon had the ability to Mega Evolve as well as have Z-moves through the Z-Crystal feature. Although these mechanics are not in Generation IX, Terastal Phenomena is the feature that replaces these previous mechanics.

Terastal Phenomena is the process of a Pokémon changing its form. Apart from changing its appearance into a gem-like state, a Pokémon also changes its type into a tera type. Tera type Pokémon can gain a boost in attack if the tera type is the same as its original. For example, Eevee is a normal type Pokémon which can either terastallize and keep its normal type attribute, giving a boost in normal type moves or it can change its type completely giving it a type advantage. An Eevee normally wouldn’t know any water or grass type moves without the use of a TM but with a tera type of water or grass you can change Eevee to give it this type.

There is a total of 18 tera types that can be found in Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet. There are many combinations and setups players can build with the number of tera types which leads to online ranked battles to be more tedious. Rather than predicting what type of Pokémon an opposing trainer will use, players now also must come up with strategies that include their opponent terastallizing their Pokémon and dealing with type change. The second season of ranked battles will run from now until January 31, 2023, at 3:59 PST.