Ever since first encountering them in Pokémon Battle Revolution, I have loved the idea of little cup battles. In this format, you are allowed only to use Pokémon that are able to evolve and they must be at level five. My partner introduced me to random battles on Pokémon Showdown in which your team is randomly selected from a pre-determined list Pokémon and movesets. Naturally, I wanted to try to play some random little cup battles with him, so I put together this tool.

The sets in this tool are almost all taken from Smogon, but we included a couple nikcnames easter eggs referencing some of our favorite Pokémon plushies.

LC Random Battle Team

One major factor that makes little cup interesting to me is the reliance on egg moves. These moves are inherited by a Pokémon when it is bred, and I have always been interested in Pokémon breeding for its mix of hidden mechanics and the meditative act of hatching egg after egg.

The second interesting thing about little cup is the mathematics of effort values. Each Pokémon can obtain at most 510 effort values spread between its stats by defeating Pokémon in battles that earn experience. Up to a maximum of 63, a pokemon at level 100 gets an additional point to a stat for every four effort values it has in that stat. Crucially, Pokémon in little cup are far from level 100, so effort values have a very different effect. To illustrate this, the formula for computing the HP stat of a level five Pokémon is

\[\text{HP}=\left\lfloor\frac{2(\text{Base HP})+\text{HP IVs}+\left\lfloor\frac{\text{HP EVs}}{4}\right\rfloor}{20}\right\rfloor+15.\]

As an example, if we wanted to train a Mareanie as a wall, we might want to maximize its HP stat. Mareanie has a base HP stat of 50 and we would breed a Mareanie with perfect 31 for its IVs. This yields

\[\text{HP}_{\text{Mareanie}}=\left\lfloor\frac{131+\left\lfloor\frac{\text{HP EVs}}{4}\right\rfloor}{20}\right\rfloor+15.\]

Note that if we put the full 252 EVs in, we end up with $\left\lfloor\frac{194}{20}\right\rfloor+15$, but when we divide by 20 and round down, the 194 is no better than 180, meaning we’ve wasted $14\times4=56$ EVs! So instead, to maximize our HP stat, we need to invest only $(180-131)\times4=196$ EVs, leaving us extra EVs to invest in other stats.

Now of course there is some subtlety in wanting to balance investment in HP and investment in defensive stats, so the Smogon set for Mareanie ends up investing only 116 EVs in HP (which you’ll notice is $20\times4=80$ less than maximum, so still nothing is lost in the rounding step).