Malachite (Day 69)

Pokemon XY spoilers follow.

I'm still making incredibly slow progress in this game! Some of the new Pokemon designs I've encountered are actually really cool. I recently added Honedge to my party, which is a Steel/Ghost type that is literally a floating, sentient sword. I love the concept behind it and I think it's the first Pokemon with that type combination. It's not necessarily as strong defensively as a pure Steel type would be, but thematically it definitely fits. I haven't been able to find a lot of information about the kind of moves it eventually learns, but according to what I have been able to find, it has ridiculously high offense once it gets to its final evolution.

I'm still trying to internalize the ridiculously complicated interaction between the different types. Of course, I've played at least one game from every generation since the beginning, but there are long stretches of time where I'm not playing and my memory fails me. Generation VI further complicates the type chart with this new Fairy type.

Off the top of my head, Fairy type moves are super effective against Dragon, Dark, and Fighting. Having another type that is effective against Dragon is really interesting because Dragon types have historically been statistical powerhouses with few easily accessible weaknesses. In the past, they were only weak to Dragon and Ice while resisting several common types like Fire, Grass, and Water. This presented some interesting problems. Ice types are notoriously terrible defensive Pokemon, possessing weaknesses to common types like Rock and Fighting while having very close to no resistances. As such, the best way to deal with dragons was to teach Ice type moves to non-Ice Pokemon, forgoing the 1.5x same-type attack bonus, but still exploiting the 2x bonus for hitting super effectively.

Fairy types, however, are completely immune to Dragon-type moves and are super effective against them! Only time will tell if these Pokemon are a truly effective counter. I've only seen maybe one or two Fairy type moves so far so I don't know what the movepool looks like. Similarly, I'm not sure if many statistically strong Fairy types exist. I'm interested to see if Flabebe's final evolution is strong as I have one in my party right now.

Current roster:

• Timur the Quilladin (Grass/Lv 22)
• Combusken (Fire/Fighting/Lv 24)
• Valara the Wartortle (Water/Lv 21)
• Siegfried the Honedge (Steel/Ghost/Lv 18)
• Cordelia the Flabebe (Fairy/Lv 16)
• Athos the Espurr (Psychic/Lv 13)