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Threshold Tiers

A threshold tier is a named stat cutoff that an IV spread has to clear to reach the next meaningful battle outcome against a notable opponent. This page is about the Threshold Tiers section of a deep dive - what the cards show you, what the numbers mean, and how to use them when you’re picking which IV to invest in.

What a tier card actually shows

Three things to read off the tier card header in the screenshot:

1. The tier name. It’s usually “(opponent) Atk” or “(opponent) Bulk” or “Fortified (opponent)” - a shorthand for “this tier is defined by a specific breakpoint or bulkpoint against that opponent.” Expert-authored tiers keep their authored names instead (e.g. “GH Great” / “GH Good” on the Tinkaton dives). In the screenshot, the Dusknoir Atk badge means this cutoff was derived from a damage breakpoint against Dusknoir.
2. The stat cutoff. The part after the middle dot is what an IV spread has to clear to be a member of the tier. atk ≥ 142.54 means the IV spread’s effective attack stat (base + IV, at the level the CP cap allows) has to be at least 142.54. A tier can have any combination of atk ≥, def ≥, and hp ≥ cutoffs; stats without a cutoff aren’t restricted.
3. The member count in parentheses. 220 IV spreads means that many of the 4096 possible IV spreads clear this tier’s cutoffs. The higher the number, the easier the tier is to hit with a catchable IV spread; the lower, the rarer.

Below the header, each card carries a list of anchor bullets - the specific matchup flips this tier buys you. The Dusknoir Atk card in the screenshot lists Lapras, Corviknight, and Tinkaton bullets alongside the namesake Dusknoir bullet - because clearing a stricter atk cutoff like 142.54 automatically clears every looser atk cutoff (131.52 Atk for Lapras, 134.13 Atk for Corviknight, etc.) at the same time.

Tier vs anchor vs category

These three words show up near each other and it’s worth being precise:

• An anchor is a single per-opponent rule. “Your attack has to be at least X to cross Lapras’s damage breakpoint” is one anchor. Anchors are the raw material.
• A tier is a named card in the IV Recommendations grid, usually backed by one anchor (the one the tier is named after) but with every other anchor it clears listed in the bullets below. Tiers are what the dive shows you.
• A category is a higher-level grouping used in the Per-matchup IV finder (collapsed inside IV Recommendations). Slayer categories (Anchors-First Slayer / CMP-First Slayer) sort IVs by strategy; composite categories are intersections like “Anchors-First Slayer AND Top 5% by stat product” that call out the rarer IVs. Categories are read laterally across many tiers at once.

If you’re reading a dive for the first time, start with tiers. Go to categories once you’ve picked out one or two tier cards that look relevant.

Why tiers overlap

Two things make tiers overlap, and both are intentional.

Stricter cutoffs contain looser ones. When one tier’s atk cutoff sits above another’s (on the reference dive, Grumpig Slayer’s atk >= 116.44 vs Oinkologne Atk’s atk >= 116.03), any IV spread that meets the stricter cutoff automatically meets the looser one. So the stricter tier’s bullet list is a superset of the looser tier’s bullets. The dive surfaces this deliberately rather than de-duplicating: a card telling you everything a cutoff buys at once is more informative than one that only lists the namesake matchup.

Crossed-axis tiers don’t contain each other. A tier that only cares about attack (say, “Lapras Slayer”) and a tier that only cares about defense (say, “Fortified Greedent”) don’t sit on the same axis at all. Atk anchors show up on one card, def anchors on the other, and the IVs that clear both are a separate rare intersection that the Per-matchup IV finder usually calls out.

When two tiers share the same primary anchor but different member counts - one says atk >= 123.74, def >= 100 and the other just atk >= 123.74 - the dive puts a small (-N vs parent) note on the stricter tier’s header so you can see at a glance that the stricter one trades off def-sacrificing (or hp-low) IV spreads the looser one keeps.

How to use the clear count

The 1 IV spreads style member count is the single most actionable number on a tier card.

• Above ~500 (roughly 1/8 of the 4096 IV space): common tier. A typical catch will already clear it, or will clear it with minor XL investment. You shouldn’t have to chase a specific IV spread for this tier unless the cutoff is on the edge of something you catch.
• ~100-500: selective but attainable. Worth checking your paste-box highlights on the scatter plot to see which of your catchable IV spreads already qualify.
• Under ~100: genuinely rare. If a named matchup requires this tier, the IV recommendation on the card is telling you to deliberately target that spread (trade, egg-hatch filter, or specific-level XL lock).

Those ranges are rules of thumb, not hard lines. What matters is the relative ordering: a tier with 46 members is an order of magnitude rarer than one with 460, and the paste-box overlay will show which of your catchable IV spreads fall inside each.

One worked example, quickly

Corviknight Great League has 6 threshold-tier cards on its featured moveset. The top card - Aegislash (Shield) Slayer - cuts on attack and HP: atk >= 112.79 and HP >= 142, and 1 of the 4096 IV spreads meet it. A tier only lists the axes it actually cuts on, so the axes named here are the ones this tier constrains; the rest are unrestricted. That means clearing that tier isn’t free - it rules out every IV spread that misses any one of those cutoffs. But every IV spread that does meet it also flips the matchups listed as primary bullets below - the namesake breakpoint or bulkpoint plus every looser cutoff on the same axes for this moveset.

Read the card top-down: tier name tells you what opponent drives the cutoff; the cutoff tells you what stat you need; the member count tells you how selective it is; the bullets tell you what matchups you gain by clearing it; and the member-IV list (collapsed at the bottom of the card) tells you which specific IV spreads qualify. That’s the whole surface.

Where to go next

• IV Flavor Guide - covers the teal IV Flavor Guide zone that sits next to Threshold Tiers on the dive page and explains how the Plotly legend’s names (like “Lapras Slayer”) relate to the tier cards’ auto-derived names (like “Aegislash (Shield) Slayer”).
• Envelope Position - covers how a tier’s bullets classify as “rider” or “band-crosser” shapes and what that says about how robust the tier’s advantage is.
• Deep-Dive Scatter - the scatter plot at the top of every dive colours points by tier membership. The scatter is where you see which specific IVs land in each tier.
• Reading a CD Article - the CD article’s IV Recommendations card grid points into tier cards from each form’s paired dive.
• How This Works - if you want the short version of how the underlying simulation is built.

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 2026-09-28.