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Reading a CD Article

A CD article is a short, opinion-shaped page we publish ahead of each Community Day. It pairs the incoming CD move with a per-scenario read on whether the move is actually worth chasing, which of the species’s forms benefits most, and which IVs inside each form get the biggest lift. It’s the page you should open first when Niantic announces the next CD; the per-species dives are the page you open when you’ve decided the species is worth a dust commit and you want to pick a specific IV spread.

This guide walks through what each section of a CD article shows, how to read the tables and cards, and where the article intentionally differs from the dive pages it links to.

When a CD article gets written

One CD article goes up for every announced Community Day we cover, a week or two before the event. The worked example in this guide is drawn from our Oinkologne Community Day write-up, “Is Mud Slap Worth It?”, which covered the 2026-05-09 CD that added Mud Slap to both Oinkologne forms. That article and its Male-form dive have since been retired, so the figures below illustrate what each section of a CD article shows rather than a live page you can open; the layout they walk through is unchanged.

Each article links to its paired deep dive pages (one per form, when the species has form splits). The dive pages give you the full threshold-tier cards, the scatter plot, and the Notable IVs section. The CD article is explicitly the “what’s new, was it worth it, which form do I build” layer on top of those.

The banner bar: who wrote this

Every CD article opens with a coloured authorship banner so you can tell at a glance whether the prose is human-authored, human-supported, or purely auto-generated.

• Gold banner (“written by a human analyst”): the narrative sections were written by an expert. Opinions in the Meta Role, Verdict, and IV Recommendations prose are load-bearing and reflect editorial judgment.
• Green banner (“human-written analysis supported by simulation data”): hybrid - human-written prose with generated tables and grids woven in.
• Blue banner (“auto-generated from simulation data”): the prose was produced by our templated narrative generator. The shapes and numbers are mechanical; any editorial framing (“switch GL pick,” “clear upgrade”) comes from a small vocabulary of auto-gen patterns, not from a human taking a stance.
• Orange banner (“LLM-drafted, not yet human-reviewed”): the prose was drafted by an LLM and is awaiting human review. Distinct from blue because LLMs make register choices a template can’t, so the orange border flags the section for extra scrutiny. CD articles rarely ship with this banner; it’s mostly used in the Reader’s Guides while they’re being polished.

The reference Oinkologne article is currently auto-generated (blue banner) - readable, numerically accurate, and deliberately low-opinion. When a human expert signs off on it later, the banner turns gold or green and the attribution line below each narrative block updates to match.

The obsolescence banner

The banner is editorial: when one of us decides an article’s framing no longer applies, we flip an [obsolescence] field in the article TOML and the banner appears on the next publish. Triggers we’ve used or expect to use:

• The CD move turned out to be strictly better or worse than the article’s “sidegrade” / “upgrade” framing claimed. (Article was written before launch; live data showed something different.)
• The opponent meta has shifted enough that the article’s per- matchup deltas read against an opponent pool nobody plays anymore (e.g. a new species drops the old #1 out of the top 50).
• A simulator fix changed the underlying numbers (a damage formula bugfix, a new shield-policy gate) and the article’s headline conclusion no longer matches what the dives now say.

A red “This article is outdated” banner appears at the top with a dated note explaining what changed. The article stays live - its numbers at time of writing are sometimes still useful for historical comparison - but the banner is an explicit “don’t treat this as current advice.”

No banner visible means the article is current.

Section by section, top to bottom

Introduction

One paragraph answering: what move is the species getting, what does that move do to the species’s overall win rate, what are the biggest three matchups flipping in, what two or three are flipping out, and when is the CD. If you read only the Introduction you should be able to decide whether the CD is worth powering a new one.

Stats at a Glance

A small table showing each form’s rank-1 IV-spread stats (Attack, Defense, HP) alongside the form’s rank-1 IV triple and the level-at-cap. For Oinkologne (Female) it’s the two-column Female/Male readout; for a single-form species it collapses to one column.

Meta Role

The longest prose section. A type-by-type walk through the matchups the new CD move flips into wins (or out of wins). The prose groups wins and losses by opponent typing: “flips the Steel bucket x1.6,” “vs Ghost-type,” “vs Water-type.” This is where you see the shape of the upgrade. Read the gains list to confirm the species gains coverage you actually want; read the losses list to see whether the new move costs you a matchup you were relying on.

Numbers in this section are the per-opponent win rates at PvPoke’s default opponent IVs with bait enabled, averaged across all nine shield scenarios.

Move Comparison

A side-by-side table of the old default fast move vs the CD fast move: type, power, energy gain, turns, DPT, EPT, STAB. This is the raw mechanical delta - the Meta Role section is the downstream consequence of this table.

Fast Moves / Charged Moves

Tables listing every move the species can learn. A Tag column marks the incoming CD move and the current default moveset; rows sort by damage-per-turn (fast) or power (charged), descending.

Meta Coverage

A per-form grid with one row per form and one column per shield scenario (0v0, 0v1, 0v2, 1v0, 1v1, 1v2, 2v0, 2v1, 2v2). Cell value is the form’s win rate on the CD moveset at that shield count, coloured green above 50% and red below.

How to read the shield-scenario grid

Shield asymmetry dominates the extremes: 2v0 (you have two, they have none) is essentially a free win, and 0v2 is essentially a free loss, regardless of species or form. So the interesting reading isn’t the absolute numbers in the corners - it’s within a column: does form choice swing the outcome at a given shield count?

Most players give the even-shield scenarios (0v0, 1v1, 2v2) more weight when team-building, because those are the states opponents most often end up in after mutual shield trades. Playstyle matters too - an aggressive shielder weights 0v0 / 0v1 / 0v2 more; a shield-hoarder weights 2v0 / 2v1 / 2v2 more.

Dropdown control

The Meta Coverage section carries a small dropdown control that rewrites the numbers in both this grid and the Matchup Delta table below:

• Opponent IVs: PvPoke default vs Rank 1 - switches every opponent’s IV spread between PvPoke’s current default and the opponent’s highest-stat-product IV spreads. Rank-1 opponents are marginally bulkier; matchups sitting on a breakpoint edge can flip with the switch.
• Bait: Selective vs Never - disables bait-first shielding so the opponent never concedes a bait-move shield. Some matchups that depend on bait-bait-nuke sequencing flip when the opponent refuses to bite.

Sections above and below Meta Coverage are fixed at PvPoke-default + bait-on and don’t react to the dropdown.

Matchup Delta

The per-opponent table underneath Meta Coverage. One row per opponent, one column per form-plus-move combo. Cells show the form’s win rate on the CD move, the form’s win rate on the old move, and the signed delta in percentage points. Rows where a form flips a matchup (crosses 50% in either direction) are tinted green or red.

Click any column header to sort. The most common useful sort is by one form’s CD-move delta descending - the rows that bubble to the top are the biggest incoming wins. Sorting the same column ascending shows the biggest drops.

Above the table is a PvPoke multi-battle link per form - one click opens a PvPoke multi-battle page with the opponent pool, the form’s CD moveset, and the default IVs pre-filled, so you can eyeball any row in PvPoke’s native simulator without re-entering anything.

Female vs Male (form-comparison)

Only shown for species with form splits. A compact read on which form wins more scenarios on the shared opponent pool. Contains:

• Base Stats - side-by-side attack/defense/stamina (distinct from Stats at a Glance, which showed rank-1 derived values).
• Moveset - verifies both forms are running the same moves (they usually are, but worth confirming).
• Verdict - the single-line “Form A wins X%, Form B wins Y%” on the shared pool.

For Oinkologne (Female), the verdict reads “Female 47.8% vs Male 43.8%” on the reference article - a visible but not decisive lean. Which form to power depends on which of the 87 opponents your team actually needs to answer, which is what the Matchup Delta table above is for.

IV Recommendations

A card grid, one card per tier cut-off per form. Each card shows:

• The tier name (Lapras Slayer, Fortified Greedent, Wigglytuff Slayer, etc.).
• The stat cutoffs to hit it.
• The member count out of 4096 IV spreads.
• A one-line description of what matchups the cut buys you.

Cards link directly into the corresponding tier card on the paired deep dive, so clicking through gives you the full threshold ladder with per-scenario bullets. Female cards are tagged with a female glyph and pink tint; Male cards use a male glyph and blue tint. New to threshold tiers? The Threshold Tiers guide walks through what the cut-offs and member counts mean.

Verdict

One green callout box at the bottom - the article’s headline conclusion. For Oinkologne: “Clear upgrade: Mud Slap wins every shield scenario.” Above the Verdict, the top-of-article upgrade / sidegrade / downgrade badge on the meta line is the one-word version of the same judgment.

What’s in the CD article but NOT in the dive pages

• The Move Comparison table (old vs new move side by side). A dive page doesn’t know about the “old” move; it sweeps whichever movesets are configured.
• The Matchup Delta table (per-opponent old-vs-new deltas). A dive page shows absolute win rates per moveset, not deltas.
• The Female vs Male pairwise read. Each dive only knows about one form; the comparison is synthesized at the article level.
• The PvPoke multi-battle link with both forms pre-loaded.
• The Verdict callout and the one-word framing badge.

What’s in the dive pages but NOT in the CD article

• The Scatter plot. CD articles don’t embed a Plotly figure - the article is paper-readable. The dive page is where you go to see every IV as a point. See the Deep-Dive Scatter guide for the scatter controls.
• The Threshold Tier cards in full, with their member IV lists and envelope tags. The article grid links into them.
• The IV Flavor Guide (the purple narrative zone above the tier cards). That’s a dive-page surface; the CD article’s IV Recommendations section condenses to the tier cutoffs without the flavor prose.
• The “Check my collection” paste-box. That’s a scatter-plot feature, dive-page only.

How the CD article and the dive pages stay in sync

Every CD article is generated from the paired deep dives’ data plus a CD-specific TOML block (cd_prep) that carries the pre-CD move the species is getting. When we re-run the dives, the article regenerates on the same publish and the numbers in both surfaces update together. That’s why the article doesn’t carry its own numerical methodology footer - the methodology is the dive’s methodology, and the article embeds compact “How the numbers are computed” pull-outs that link back to the How This Works guide for the full story.

Where to go next

• How This Works - the one-page overview of what the simulator does and how we check it against PvPoke.
• Deep-Dive Scatter - the interactive scatter plot that the CD article’s IV Recommendations section points into.
• Threshold Tiers - what the stat cutoffs and member counts on the IV Recommendations cards actually mean.
• IV Flavor Guide - the purple narrative zone on the dive pages that the CD article’s IV Recommendations section is a distillation of.

Battle engine is a Python port of PvPoke; all game data from PvPoke by Empoleon_Dynamite (MIT license). This project would not exist without it.

Part of the PvP dive site. Explainers regenerate from current dive data every publish, so numbers stay in sync with the methodology. Last regenerated 2026-08-27.