Pokémon Champions’ HOME bug is the exact nightmare collectors feared

If you were about to dump your lifelong collection into Pokémon Champions through Pokémon HOME, this is the moment to hit pause. A critical transfer bug – showing up as Error 400-9007 – is leaving Pokémon stuck and effectively inaccessible, and the way it’s happening cuts right at the one thing HOME was supposed to guarantee: long-term safety.

Right now, the pattern is brutal: transfer from HOME into Champions, get flagged as a “visit,” hit Error 400-9007, and suddenly that Pokémon is locked out of both Champions and HOME. No official fix, no clear messaging, just players watching their digital history hang in server limbo.

Key takeaways

• The critical Pokémon HOME transfer bug (Error 400-9007) can leave Pokémon stuck as “visiting” in Pokémon Champions and inaccessible from both Champions and HOME.
• Evidence points to a sync/auth mismatch between HOME’s servers, the Switch client, and mobile – not simple “bad Wi-Fi” – and generic cache clears only sometimes help.
• There is no official, reliable fix for Error 400-9007 yet; support pages don’t even name the code, just vaguely address account-link issues.
• Until The Pokémon Company ships a confirmed fix, the safest move is do not transfer irreplaceable Pokémon into Champions via HOME.

This is the nightmare scenario Pokémon HOME was built to prevent

The whole pitch of Pokémon HOME was simple: “Your collection is safe here, across generations.” When Champions arrived on Switch and mobile with HOME support and cross-play, it looked like more of that same promise – a new arena, but the same vault underneath.

Error 400-9007 blows a hole straight through that trust. Players are reporting that when they transfer Pokémon from HOME into Pokémon Champions, those Pokémon get labeled as “visiting” and then effectively vanish into a crack between services. HOME thinks they’re out on loan to Champions. Champions, after the error, doesn’t properly register them. Result: the system believes the Pokémon is elsewhere, so it won’t let you move it back to Scarlet/Violet or anywhere else.

This isn’t just losing a recent catch. For a lot of people, these are monsters that started life in cartridges from a decade or more ago, slowly walked through Bank, into HOME, and now into Champions. When those get stuck, it’s not just a bug – it’s years of invested time and sentimental value held hostage by a broken flag in a database.

What Error 400-9007 seems to be doing under the hood

The official support pages are almost silent on this. Error 400-9007 doesn’t appear in Pokémon’s public error-code docs; what we have instead are generic notes about account linking and connection issues, plus player reports and some pattern recognition.

Based on those reports, a few things line up:

• The bug triggers during or right after a HOME ⇄ Champions transfer. It’s not a random HOME login error; it’s closely tied to moves involving Champions.
• Pokémon end up marked as “visiting” in Champions. That’s normal during a transfer window, but they never fully arrive or fully return.
• HOME then treats the Pokémon as unavailable. It thinks the monster is still assigned to Champions, so it can’t be withdrawn to other games.
• Transfers throw Error 400-9007 on either Switch or mobile. That suggests server-side validation or sync is failing, not just a single-device glitch.

On the technical side, 400-series errors typically point to a bad request or something the server refuses to process. The “9007” looks like an internal sub-code – most likely an edge case the devs never expected to hit at scale. Players have also tied some cases to things like:

• Differences between what the mobile app thinks your account status is and what the Switch version thinks.
• Pending Terms of Service updates or account changes that weren’t fully applied.
• Corrupted or outdated cached data after patches or device swaps.

None of that is officially confirmed, but the behavior tracks with a backend that’s getting conflicting information about where a Pokémon “lives” and whether your account is allowed to move it. The code that should reconcile those conflicts is failing – and instead of rolling back cleanly, the system is leaving Pokémon in a half-moved state.

That’s the part the PR team will never say out loud: this is not just a “network hiccup.” This is state corruption in the one database players are told to trust more than any individual game save.

Who gets hurt the most by this bug

In theory, anyone using Champions’ HOME integration is at risk. In practice, three groups get hit hardest.

1. Long-time collectors. The people moving shiny-locked event legendaries from generations ago are the ones with the most to lose. If your Mythical from a one-time event is flagged as “visiting” and vanishes from practical use, you can’t just breed another one. For a collector, that’s years of work trapped in a bug.

2. Competitive players. Early VGC-adjacent chatter has mentioned tournament-ready Pokémon getting stuck in limbo. These aren’t casual boxes; they’re teams with perfect IVs, egg moves, and careful training. Losing access, even temporarily, can blow up prep schedules for events and online ladders.

3. Players leaning into cross-platform play. Champions selling itself as a Switch/mobile experience with HOME support encourages constant movement between devices and titles. That’s exactly the behavior most likely to stir up sync issues if the backend isn’t rock solid. The more often you move things, the more chances you give Error 400-9007 to fire.

The uncomfortable part: HOME’s “forever box” reputation just took a hit

This isn’t the first time Pokémon’s online infrastructure has wobbled. We’ve had Pokémon Bank outages. Scarlet & Violet launched with bugs that could corrupt saves under certain conditions. HOME has seen login issues and slow rollouts before.

The difference here is the exact promise being broken. HOME was pitched as a long-term solution to the one constant fear in this franchise: that one day you’d lose access to the old cartridge, the old console, or the old save, and the monsters would just be gone. You were told to trust the cloud instead.

Error 400-9007 is the flip side of that bet. When the cloud fails, you don’t even have local save-scumming as a backup. There’s no cloning glitch you can lean on. All you can do is hope support can see what state your account is in and manually unwind the mess – assuming they acknowledge the code and have tooling for it.

If I had one question in front of The Pokémon Company’s live-ops team, it would be this: what’s your recovery plan when HOME’s state gets out of sync with a connected game? Not your PR plan. Your tooling, your logs, your ability to take a list of stuck Pokémon and put them back where they belong without telling players “delete the app and try again.”

So what can you actually do right now?

There’s no sugarcoating it: there is no guaranteed, user-side fix for Error 400-9007 at this point. Some players have gotten lucky, others haven’t. If you care about your collection, your best move is to play defense.

1. The safest option: stop transferring into Champions

Until there’s an official acknowledgement and a patch specifically mentioning transfer fixes or Error 400-9007, treat Champions integration as unsafe for anything you’re not prepared to lose access to for a while. That’s harsh, but this is exactly the sort of issue you don’t want to test with your rarest team.

2. If you’ve already been hit by Error 400-9007

• Stop trying repeated transfers. Spamming the transfer process risks compounding whatever state conflict already exists.
• Document everything. Take screenshots of the error code, your HOME boxes, your Champions boxes, and the “visiting” status. If support escalates your case, this helps.
• Check both platforms. Log into HOME on both Switch and mobile. Sometimes one side refreshes state faster; very occasionally, stuck Pokémon will reappear normally after a successful sync.

3. “Soft” recovery attempts players have reported

None of the following are guaranteed, and you should treat them as “might help, shouldn’t make it worse” – not solutions:

• Clearing app cache on mobile Pokémon HOME, then logging back in.
• Reinstalling HOME on mobile, re-linking your Nintendo Account, and forcing a fresh sync.
• Fully closing and reopening Champions, or redownloading game data, to sync its view of your HOME links.

Some players say these steps helped release at least part of their stuck collection. Others say nothing changed. Crucially, there’s no consistent pattern that lets us confidently say “do X and your Pokémon will come back.”

4. Contact support – but manage expectations

Even if the public-facing support docs don’t mention Error 400-9007, filing a ticket with detailed information is worth it for two reasons: it creates pressure and it gives engineers real-world cases to debug. Just don’t assume a fast, custom recovery for your specific stuck Pokémon unless and until they confirm they can fix those states.

What to watch next

The next few weeks will tell us how seriously The Pokémon Company treats this. There are a few concrete signals to watch for:

• Patch notes for Champions and HOME. Look specifically for mentions of “transfer stability,” “visiting Pokémon,” or Error 400-9007 by name.
• An official support article or social media post. Acknowledging that Pokémon can become stuck between HOME and Champions and outlining recovery steps would be a big shift from the current quiet.
• Reports of recovered Pokémon without user action. If players start seeing previously stuck Pokémon reappear in HOME or Champions after server maintenance, that hints at a backend cleanup job being run.
• Any talk of compensation. Even something small – tickets, items, in-game resources – would be an implicit admission that the bug had real impact.

If we reach the point where Champions is getting balance patches and events but there’s still no public fix for Error 400-9007, that’s a clear sign of priorities – and a reason for players to think very hard before trusting the HOME ecosystem with their rarest monsters again.

TL;DR

Pokémon Champions is currently affected by a critical Pokémon HOME transfer bug, Error 400-9007, that can leave Pokémon flagged as “visiting” and effectively stuck between Champions and HOME. The bug appears to stem from a sync/auth mismatch across HOME servers, Switch, and mobile, and there’s no reliable user-side fix or direct official guidance yet. The practical move for now is simple: keep your valuable Pokémon out of Champions transfers until a documented fix lands, and if you’re already affected, document everything, contact support, and avoid making the state conflict worse.