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kjorteoAre you ready to meet another new member of the team for our upcoming trip to Kanto? We told you; the team options expand dramatically once you're in the postgame (even if SoulSilver's "postgame" is effectively a midgame... the inverted castle from Symphony of the Night is about the closest analogy that comes to mind) and so a lot of doors for recruitment have opened all at once. These Special Aside posts are an effort to shine more of a spotlight on each of the newcomers, in an attempt to give them some characterization, that they may hopefully better fit in with the ones whose lives and stories you've been keeping in your hearts this entire time.
Unless we're forgetting someone, I expect there to be a total of four of these posts. Three come immediately after toppling Lance and becoming the Johto League Champion (technically we actually could have done these even sooner since they're just more self-trades from Diamond, but it just seemed more fair and sporting to wait,) and so their entries and introductions come right now, before our next session. The fourth will require the National Dex, which we technically still don't have yet since we just saved and quit after the credits, even if we're mere minutes from getting it next time. Thus, you most likely can expect the fourth introduction to come in between the next session and the one after.
For now, here is the second of the three immediate ones. Last time, we met Badgertwo. This time, meet another construct of sorts searching for humanity, though less of a genetically optimized weapon and more of a robotic guardian. A sentinel, a sworn protector searching for purpose outside the battlefield.
So, hey. Remember which Pokemon on Silver's team was the biggest thorn in our side every time we fought it?
The problem with Electric types in this generation was that, while it is a very useful offensive element whose absence very much left a hole in our overall type coverage (Lance's Gyarados was 4x weak to it, for example, but we had no way to capitalize,) its utility is limited by its bearers. For our journey up to this point, the strongest "okay, who's an Electric type Pokemon we could have on our team?" option we had in the Johto league was Kracko the Ampharos, who was... ehh... okay? I mean, Kracko had some moments, even if never achieving the "offensive powerhouse" status one came to see in teammates like Auryn or Oracle.
However, gen 4 was when the Magnemite line gained another evolution. Whether it needed to gain another one was arguable; Magneton was already at least as powerful and viable as Ampharos, Jolteon, or any other Electric option even in that form. Gain another one it did, though, and Diamond/Pearl/Platinum and HeartGold/SoulSilver all saw the debut of the fearsome Magnezone.
Simply put, Magnezone is a beast. Its typing gives it a quite frankly lewd amount of resistances (and an outright immunity to Poison, both the move/attack type and the status effect) and a mere three weaknesses (Fighting, Fire, and Ground.) One of those--Ground--happens to be a 4x weakness, and so Magnezone can get one-shotted by a well placed Earthquake; this is about the only thing keeping it even remotely balanced. On the other hand, it can learn Magnet Rise, a self buff that effectively makes it levitate (in other words, become completely immune to Ground-type moves) for five turns. Meanwhile, it has an also lewd 130 Special Attack, which ties both the Special Attack stat of Oracle and physical attack stat of Omnihunter, and actually beats Auryn's Special Attack by 30. The only Pokemon on our team thus far with even technically higher offense is Falkor, whose physical Attack is 134, and even that's close enough that a head to head matchup would come down more to IVs and nature. It's slow enough that sweeping could be a problem, yet at least decent-ish at tanking in return... of course, all of these are the same things we said about Oracle, who turned out fine.
Actually, that is a scarily apt comparison. Stat-wise, Magnezone pairs the absurd Special Attack of Glaceon with the okay defense (Physical more than Special) and awful HP/Speed of... Glaceon. In fact, comparing Glaceon to Magnezone, their overall stats are no more than about give or take 5 apart from each other in every single category. In other words, their stats are practically interchangeable; Magnezone is just Glaceon but Electric/Steel instead of Ice and with a move to get rid of its own biggest weakness (and one of only three weaknesses it has in total.) That said, even if those are the only differences, they are very big and very beneficial differences. Oracle was already a monster; "What if Oracle were Electric/Steel instead and had Magnet Rise" is just terrifying.
The original plan was to get a Magnemite from the Pokewalker and level it up, but I changed my mind and got it from Diamond instead, for three reasons. One, in yet another Glaceon similarity, the Magnemite-Magnezone evolution has to be done by leveling up when standing in a special location that only exists in Sinnoh; they simply are not obtainable in HeartGold/SoulSilver without a Diamond/Pearl/Platinum trade. So, like, it was going to be spending time over on the Diamond side anyway, you know? Two, Diamond Magnemite encounters are at a significantly higher level, thus cutting down on the post-catching grind to get our new friend brought up to speed. Three, Magnemites are easier to acquire in Sinnoh anyway, as there they are a swarm Pokemon, and the fact that they have a greatly boosted encounter rate when the swarm is active makes them much, much easier to chain with the Poke Radar. It's harder to set up the initial encounter (they have to be the Pokemon chosen for the daily swarm) but once the stage is set, one can chain-catch something like 45 of them in a row in one sitting, including a Shiny at the end. That gives you a much wider pool of applicants to comb through and find the best one, rather than the Pokewalker giving you at most three at a time and that's if you walk enough to get the watts to afford that many goes at the Pokemon-catching minigame.
We narrowed the pool down to about five, and then we were stuck for a while. All five of them had tremendous stats and IVs. Any of them would have been extremely viable. To choose between them would necessitate splitting the kind of hairs that were starting to approach the kind of thinking that made Badgertwo. When a Pokemon has a good nature, the "right" ability, IVs of at least 18 (more like 22-24 on average) across the board in every single stat, and is Shiny, and you're looking at it like "Hmm... yes, but this other one has a perfect 31 Special Attack IV and a Special Attack-boosting nature, even if its Defense is worse... pros and cons..." like, if that's not all you needed to hear to make your decision, then you clearly are not Ethan.
But it's not like I was trying to obsess, here. I wasn't breeding and re-breeding in search of perfection. At no point did I imply any of the final five applicants were not good enough, or really, that any of them were anything short of amazing and outstanding. I just... I had five and I had to choose one, so I had to choose them somehow, you know? It was either "just go with the Shiny" or if I was taking any kind of strategic look at the IVs, then... well, then I was digging into the IVs.
I asked some friends for help with this dilemma. Instead of direct "you should pick #4, that looks like the best one" type advice, they posed a simple question:
"What would Moonchild say?"
("KHH-VIIIIIIIIIIIIIW," presumably.)
I thought long and hard about this, about her, about Ethan, about Silver, about Badgertwo. About everything that brought us to where we currently sit.
In the end, the answer I came up with was that... I think she trusts me. I think she would probably have her concerns that I'm getting close to the edge of the cliff, here, but when I say that I know the difference between doing Badgertwo-style experimentation on purpose and just... trying to make a strategic decision on which one to choose among five exceptionally qualified (if perhaps even overqualified) candidates that we already had sitting right there anyway... I mean, I wasn't obsessively breeding for them or anything. All I did was get a large Poke Radar chain in "catch as many in a row as you can first, sort through them all and find the best one later" logic, and sorting through them all to find the best one was what I was doing.
However, the reconsideration did get me to pull back some and reevaluate some of the standards I was using. The Magnemite family has two possible abilities it can have, for example, and "three of the candidates have the right ability but two have the wrong one" was part of the overall considerations I was juggling along with their IVs and natures and everything else. But... right and wrong by whose metric, exactly? A Magnezone can either have Magnet Pull (which makes opposing Steel- or half-Steel types unable to escape or switch out) or Sturdy (which prevents one-hit KOs from full health.) Smogon and the competitive meta scene of the day went all in on Magnet Pull being not only the obviously correct choice, but the very reason that Magnezone was one of the most OP mon in the game back then: its trapping ability made it the perfect counter to Steel enemies. Pair it with a good Fire-elemental Hidden Power and Magnezone could just devour your opponent's Scizor or Forretress and there was nothing they could do.
Okay, that's all well and good, but 1) we all know that any time a sentence starts with "According to Smogon" that's when the alarm bells need to sound, and 2) when playing through the single-player campaign, against gym leaders and such in Kanto, are we really going to be running into meta-aware enemy trainers who will make us need a dedicated Scizor/Forretress counter that prevents their switching out in response? Or would a Sturdy Magnezone perhaps be fine because we're talking about a solution to a problem that will never come up in the single-player campaign anyway?
With that realization (and a few others like it; that was an example) I relaxed my standards and reevaluated the question. I still believe there isn't anything wrong with choosing the best candidate to fill the position; I just needed a reminder about how I was defining "best." What would this particular Magnezone be up against, and what qualities would best suit it?
From the beginning of this LP, the thing we've struggled with, the biggest hole that a Magnezone in particular could help fill, is Water types. Ever since that Vaporeon from the Kimono Girls showdown, I haven't really felt secure in the whole "Oh, Grass beats Water and we have Empress; we're fine" feeling like I used to be. Not because I doubt Empress' strength at this point, but because it seems like every Water type we encounter is also secretly an Ice type, and Ice is in fact a very effective check against Grass. Empress would have beat that Vaporeon, but it knew Aurora Beam. Lance's Gyarados had Ice Fang. Every time we find a Water enemy and throw a Grass Pokemon at it, it throws an Ice move right back. So, if Grass isn't a safe way to tackle Water anymore, that's where our new friend's Electric prowess comes in.
So, what, in theory, would stop this Magnezone from sweeping Misty's gym when we get there? Surprise Ice moves wouldn't scare it, since it resists Ice. (Actually, the more straightforward Water moves themselves would be scarier, since those are at least neutral damage.) No, what's going to stop it is on the defensive side: Water types who, through some blessing of their typing, are immune or resistant to Electric. Your Swamperts and Quagsires and even Lanturns. They're all completely immune to Electric (at least if the Lanturn has Volt Absorb) and, to make matters worse, all of them also resist or strongly resist Magnezone's other STAB in Steel. What other options are there when you're the designated Water-Killer and you meet a Water type that neither of your best moves can so much as scratch?
We looked at the Hidden Powers of all five of the Magnemites we were considering. One of them (the one who has 31 SpA with a beneficial nature but something of a hole in Defense, plus Sturdy, for how much those parts matter) has an IV spread whose resulting Hidden Power comes to a power of 68--and again, this is a move whose power can be in a range anywhere from 31 to 70. In other words, it's a mere two points off of being perfect, the most potent and powerful Hidden Power could possibly be.
Its type? Grass.
We have a winner.
So, now that all that's decided, our new friend needs... well... the characterizing touches; the things that make it a friend and not just a ball of optimal stats we chose for strategic reasons. A sense of who this person is. A name.
This is a big, bulky guardian type beast. Being electronic, it may be something of an automaton seeking meaning and that "what it means to be human" feeling (but for Pokemon) akin to Lieutenant Data. It has a Modest nature, so it's... shy. Reserved. It wants to do right by its master, even though we'd rather be its friend and companion. Maybe it protects us with all its strength because that's all it knows, because it's uncomfortable with the thought of just... what else its role in life could be, if not that. And it's even genderless!
This all sounds incredibly familiar and fitting and my first thought was to name it 4RD-31 or something. However, Ardei, flattered as he was at the honor, actually declined it; he has a deeply traumatic fear of lightning. It goes beyond "it's just scary, I'm just phobic okay" and feels almost like a PTSD kind of reaction, almost like something lightning-related happened to him in a previous life or in some completely blacked out part of our memory or something... we don't have the first clue what it could be. Maybe 65 million years ago there once was an actual corporeal ankylosaur who died via a lightning strike, or perhaps the meteor (you know, some kind of "sudden and unavoidable instant death from the sky" sensation or another.) We may never know. All we know is that there is something deep regarding him and lightning, and so he did not feel comfortable with his namesake being an Electric-type. We respect that.
Other options? Hmm. Well. The Neverending Story theme could still work, even if the main arc of that was concluded with the fall of Lance. We already have another as-yet-unrevealed one of the four whom we know will have a Neverending Story name, even, so this Magnezone wouldn't even be alone in being one of the new recruits yet continuing that naming trend.
Rock Biter it is, then, even if it's more metal than stone, and the only things it eats are Water types.
Unless we're forgetting someone, I expect there to be a total of four of these posts. Three come immediately after toppling Lance and becoming the Johto League Champion (technically we actually could have done these even sooner since they're just more self-trades from Diamond, but it just seemed more fair and sporting to wait,) and so their entries and introductions come right now, before our next session. The fourth will require the National Dex, which we technically still don't have yet since we just saved and quit after the credits, even if we're mere minutes from getting it next time. Thus, you most likely can expect the fourth introduction to come in between the next session and the one after.
For now, here is the second of the three immediate ones. Last time, we met Badgertwo. This time, meet another construct of sorts searching for humanity, though less of a genetically optimized weapon and more of a robotic guardian. A sentinel, a sworn protector searching for purpose outside the battlefield.
So, hey. Remember which Pokemon on Silver's team was the biggest thorn in our side every time we fought it?
The problem with Electric types in this generation was that, while it is a very useful offensive element whose absence very much left a hole in our overall type coverage (Lance's Gyarados was 4x weak to it, for example, but we had no way to capitalize,) its utility is limited by its bearers. For our journey up to this point, the strongest "okay, who's an Electric type Pokemon we could have on our team?" option we had in the Johto league was Kracko the Ampharos, who was... ehh... okay? I mean, Kracko had some moments, even if never achieving the "offensive powerhouse" status one came to see in teammates like Auryn or Oracle.
However, gen 4 was when the Magnemite line gained another evolution. Whether it needed to gain another one was arguable; Magneton was already at least as powerful and viable as Ampharos, Jolteon, or any other Electric option even in that form. Gain another one it did, though, and Diamond/Pearl/Platinum and HeartGold/SoulSilver all saw the debut of the fearsome Magnezone.
Simply put, Magnezone is a beast. Its typing gives it a quite frankly lewd amount of resistances (and an outright immunity to Poison, both the move/attack type and the status effect) and a mere three weaknesses (Fighting, Fire, and Ground.) One of those--Ground--happens to be a 4x weakness, and so Magnezone can get one-shotted by a well placed Earthquake; this is about the only thing keeping it even remotely balanced. On the other hand, it can learn Magnet Rise, a self buff that effectively makes it levitate (in other words, become completely immune to Ground-type moves) for five turns. Meanwhile, it has an also lewd 130 Special Attack, which ties both the Special Attack stat of Oracle and physical attack stat of Omnihunter, and actually beats Auryn's Special Attack by 30. The only Pokemon on our team thus far with even technically higher offense is Falkor, whose physical Attack is 134, and even that's close enough that a head to head matchup would come down more to IVs and nature. It's slow enough that sweeping could be a problem, yet at least decent-ish at tanking in return... of course, all of these are the same things we said about Oracle, who turned out fine.
Actually, that is a scarily apt comparison. Stat-wise, Magnezone pairs the absurd Special Attack of Glaceon with the okay defense (Physical more than Special) and awful HP/Speed of... Glaceon. In fact, comparing Glaceon to Magnezone, their overall stats are no more than about give or take 5 apart from each other in every single category. In other words, their stats are practically interchangeable; Magnezone is just Glaceon but Electric/Steel instead of Ice and with a move to get rid of its own biggest weakness (and one of only three weaknesses it has in total.) That said, even if those are the only differences, they are very big and very beneficial differences. Oracle was already a monster; "What if Oracle were Electric/Steel instead and had Magnet Rise" is just terrifying.
The original plan was to get a Magnemite from the Pokewalker and level it up, but I changed my mind and got it from Diamond instead, for three reasons. One, in yet another Glaceon similarity, the Magnemite-Magnezone evolution has to be done by leveling up when standing in a special location that only exists in Sinnoh; they simply are not obtainable in HeartGold/SoulSilver without a Diamond/Pearl/Platinum trade. So, like, it was going to be spending time over on the Diamond side anyway, you know? Two, Diamond Magnemite encounters are at a significantly higher level, thus cutting down on the post-catching grind to get our new friend brought up to speed. Three, Magnemites are easier to acquire in Sinnoh anyway, as there they are a swarm Pokemon, and the fact that they have a greatly boosted encounter rate when the swarm is active makes them much, much easier to chain with the Poke Radar. It's harder to set up the initial encounter (they have to be the Pokemon chosen for the daily swarm) but once the stage is set, one can chain-catch something like 45 of them in a row in one sitting, including a Shiny at the end. That gives you a much wider pool of applicants to comb through and find the best one, rather than the Pokewalker giving you at most three at a time and that's if you walk enough to get the watts to afford that many goes at the Pokemon-catching minigame.
We narrowed the pool down to about five, and then we were stuck for a while. All five of them had tremendous stats and IVs. Any of them would have been extremely viable. To choose between them would necessitate splitting the kind of hairs that were starting to approach the kind of thinking that made Badgertwo. When a Pokemon has a good nature, the "right" ability, IVs of at least 18 (more like 22-24 on average) across the board in every single stat, and is Shiny, and you're looking at it like "Hmm... yes, but this other one has a perfect 31 Special Attack IV and a Special Attack-boosting nature, even if its Defense is worse... pros and cons..." like, if that's not all you needed to hear to make your decision, then you clearly are not Ethan.
But it's not like I was trying to obsess, here. I wasn't breeding and re-breeding in search of perfection. At no point did I imply any of the final five applicants were not good enough, or really, that any of them were anything short of amazing and outstanding. I just... I had five and I had to choose one, so I had to choose them somehow, you know? It was either "just go with the Shiny" or if I was taking any kind of strategic look at the IVs, then... well, then I was digging into the IVs.
I asked some friends for help with this dilemma. Instead of direct "you should pick #4, that looks like the best one" type advice, they posed a simple question:
"What would Moonchild say?"
("KHH-VIIIIIIIIIIIIIW," presumably.)
I thought long and hard about this, about her, about Ethan, about Silver, about Badgertwo. About everything that brought us to where we currently sit.
In the end, the answer I came up with was that... I think she trusts me. I think she would probably have her concerns that I'm getting close to the edge of the cliff, here, but when I say that I know the difference between doing Badgertwo-style experimentation on purpose and just... trying to make a strategic decision on which one to choose among five exceptionally qualified (if perhaps even overqualified) candidates that we already had sitting right there anyway... I mean, I wasn't obsessively breeding for them or anything. All I did was get a large Poke Radar chain in "catch as many in a row as you can first, sort through them all and find the best one later" logic, and sorting through them all to find the best one was what I was doing.
However, the reconsideration did get me to pull back some and reevaluate some of the standards I was using. The Magnemite family has two possible abilities it can have, for example, and "three of the candidates have the right ability but two have the wrong one" was part of the overall considerations I was juggling along with their IVs and natures and everything else. But... right and wrong by whose metric, exactly? A Magnezone can either have Magnet Pull (which makes opposing Steel- or half-Steel types unable to escape or switch out) or Sturdy (which prevents one-hit KOs from full health.) Smogon and the competitive meta scene of the day went all in on Magnet Pull being not only the obviously correct choice, but the very reason that Magnezone was one of the most OP mon in the game back then: its trapping ability made it the perfect counter to Steel enemies. Pair it with a good Fire-elemental Hidden Power and Magnezone could just devour your opponent's Scizor or Forretress and there was nothing they could do.
Okay, that's all well and good, but 1) we all know that any time a sentence starts with "According to Smogon" that's when the alarm bells need to sound, and 2) when playing through the single-player campaign, against gym leaders and such in Kanto, are we really going to be running into meta-aware enemy trainers who will make us need a dedicated Scizor/Forretress counter that prevents their switching out in response? Or would a Sturdy Magnezone perhaps be fine because we're talking about a solution to a problem that will never come up in the single-player campaign anyway?
With that realization (and a few others like it; that was an example) I relaxed my standards and reevaluated the question. I still believe there isn't anything wrong with choosing the best candidate to fill the position; I just needed a reminder about how I was defining "best." What would this particular Magnezone be up against, and what qualities would best suit it?
From the beginning of this LP, the thing we've struggled with, the biggest hole that a Magnezone in particular could help fill, is Water types. Ever since that Vaporeon from the Kimono Girls showdown, I haven't really felt secure in the whole "Oh, Grass beats Water and we have Empress; we're fine" feeling like I used to be. Not because I doubt Empress' strength at this point, but because it seems like every Water type we encounter is also secretly an Ice type, and Ice is in fact a very effective check against Grass. Empress would have beat that Vaporeon, but it knew Aurora Beam. Lance's Gyarados had Ice Fang. Every time we find a Water enemy and throw a Grass Pokemon at it, it throws an Ice move right back. So, if Grass isn't a safe way to tackle Water anymore, that's where our new friend's Electric prowess comes in.
So, what, in theory, would stop this Magnezone from sweeping Misty's gym when we get there? Surprise Ice moves wouldn't scare it, since it resists Ice. (Actually, the more straightforward Water moves themselves would be scarier, since those are at least neutral damage.) No, what's going to stop it is on the defensive side: Water types who, through some blessing of their typing, are immune or resistant to Electric. Your Swamperts and Quagsires and even Lanturns. They're all completely immune to Electric (at least if the Lanturn has Volt Absorb) and, to make matters worse, all of them also resist or strongly resist Magnezone's other STAB in Steel. What other options are there when you're the designated Water-Killer and you meet a Water type that neither of your best moves can so much as scratch?
We looked at the Hidden Powers of all five of the Magnemites we were considering. One of them (the one who has 31 SpA with a beneficial nature but something of a hole in Defense, plus Sturdy, for how much those parts matter) has an IV spread whose resulting Hidden Power comes to a power of 68--and again, this is a move whose power can be in a range anywhere from 31 to 70. In other words, it's a mere two points off of being perfect, the most potent and powerful Hidden Power could possibly be.
Its type? Grass.
We have a winner.
So, now that all that's decided, our new friend needs... well... the characterizing touches; the things that make it a friend and not just a ball of optimal stats we chose for strategic reasons. A sense of who this person is. A name.
This is a big, bulky guardian type beast. Being electronic, it may be something of an automaton seeking meaning and that "what it means to be human" feeling (but for Pokemon) akin to Lieutenant Data. It has a Modest nature, so it's... shy. Reserved. It wants to do right by its master, even though we'd rather be its friend and companion. Maybe it protects us with all its strength because that's all it knows, because it's uncomfortable with the thought of just... what else its role in life could be, if not that. And it's even genderless!
This all sounds incredibly familiar and fitting and my first thought was to name it 4RD-31 or something. However, Ardei, flattered as he was at the honor, actually declined it; he has a deeply traumatic fear of lightning. It goes beyond "it's just scary, I'm just phobic okay" and feels almost like a PTSD kind of reaction, almost like something lightning-related happened to him in a previous life or in some completely blacked out part of our memory or something... we don't have the first clue what it could be. Maybe 65 million years ago there once was an actual corporeal ankylosaur who died via a lightning strike, or perhaps the meteor (you know, some kind of "sudden and unavoidable instant death from the sky" sensation or another.) We may never know. All we know is that there is something deep regarding him and lightning, and so he did not feel comfortable with his namesake being an Electric-type. We respect that.
Other options? Hmm. Well. The Neverending Story theme could still work, even if the main arc of that was concluded with the fall of Lance. We already have another as-yet-unrevealed one of the four whom we know will have a Neverending Story name, even, so this Magnezone wouldn't even be alone in being one of the new recruits yet continuing that naming trend.
Rock Biter it is, then, even if it's more metal than stone, and the only things it eats are Water types.