We reported earlier this week that Serebii discovered an accidental leak from an official Korean Pokemon website leading to an image of Mega Slowbrow and Mega Audino. Today, the International Pokemon Company officially announced the release of Mega Audino for the upcoming Pokemon Alpha Ruby and Omega Sapphire.
Prior to this announcement, Audino was not known to evolve from, or to, any other form and I’d never ever seriously thought about using Audino on my Pokemon team. I’d get excited to encounter an Audino in the wild, but only because it gave an excessive amounts of experience points.
However, with the addition of Mega Evolution, Audino supposedly becomes a viable contender for competitive play. After Mega Evolving, Mega Audino adds Fairy-type to its Normal-type, automatically gaining all the advantages of a Fairy-type Pokémon.
For those of you who haven’t played Pokemon X and Y extensively, the Fairy-type was added in the latest generation of games to balance the meta. Fairy-types are strong against Dark-types, Dragon-types, and Fighting-types which had long enjoyed dominance in competitive play.
Adding the Fairy-type to Mega Audino negates the Pokemon’s usual weakness to Fighting-types, and only grants it one additional weakness to Poison in return. Ultimately a positive trade-off for Mega Audino.
Additionally, Mega-Audino gains the Healer ability and much improved Defense and Special Defense stats, making it ideal for support in Double Battles. 
While we’ll still have to wait for the release of Pokemon Alpha Ruby and Omega Sapphire to test out Mega Audino for ourselves, if the Pokemon can actually go up against a Blaziken (as shown in the video) it will be a great addition to the existing Megas.
If Mega Audino turns out to be a dud, then at least Bannette won’t be the worst Mega Pokemon any longer.
