Clefairy

The official category says Fairy Pokémon, and for twenty years it was nothing more than a label: until Generation VI, the species was a Normal type. What the name promises is there in the body. Sixty centimetres, 7.5 kilograms, a shape that leans towards a star, long ears and a pair of tiny wings on its back that are no use for flying. According to the Pokédex, those wings store moonlight, and that is where it gets its ability to float.

Almost everything said about this creature happens at night. Under a full moon, they come out in groups to dance, and older entries promise happiness to anyone who sees them dancing; a magnetic field forms around the circle, though nobody ever explains it. At dawn, they return exhausted to their mountain shelters and sleep huddled against one another. Other entries focus on the material side of things: few specimens remain, children and adults alike are fond of them, and anyone who boasts too much about having one risks having it stolen.

It occupies the middle rung of its evolutionary line. It evolves from Cleffa when friendship reaches 160, and stays there until someone uses a Moon Stone on it and turns it into Clefable. In the wild, it can be carrying that same Moon Stone, along with a Lum Berry or a Comet Shard.

323 points spread out without a single peak. 70 HP, 48 Defense and 65 Special Defense form a modest defensive block in absolute terms; 45 Attack and 60 Special Attack threaten no one; 35 Speed leaves it behind almost anything that moves.

What keeps it afloat is Magic Guard: only direct attacks can damage it. No poison, no burn, no recoil and no entry-hazard chip. With Eviolite — it still has not evolved — that 70/48/65 spread becomes genuinely sturdy, and that is its recognised niche in Smogon's NFE format, the one for species that have not fully evolved. The plan is not to score KOs: use Knock Off to remove items from opposing walls, Seismic Toss to deal fixed damage without relying on some feeble attacks, and Moonlight, learned at level 24, to recover in the meantime. Stealth Rock or Thunder Wave round things out as needed.

As a pure type, Fairy gives it an immunity to Dragon and resistances to Fighting, Bug and Dark, in exchange for two widely shared weaknesses: Steel and Poison. On the attacking side, it runs into those same three types. And there is one exact counter: Koffing, with Neutralizing Gas, switches off Magic Guard and leaves it defenceless against Toxic Spikes.

In a normal playthrough, the problem is timing. Moonblast, with 95 power, does not arrive until level 44, and until then its best attacks are Disarming Voice, with 40, and a level 32 Meteor Mash that comes off an Attack stat of 45. Metronome, at 20, is more of a gamble than a plan.

It belongs to a single Egg Group, Fairy, which cuts down the list of possible partners considerably compared with species in two groups. The gender ratio works in its favour for breeding: 75% are female, so getting the mother to start from is easy. The 10 Egg cycles work out at about 2805 steps, making its eggs some of the quickest to hatch.

It can inherit four moves from the egg: Present, Tickle, Heal Pulse and, above all, Wish, which restores half of the maximum HP of the Pokémon on the field on the following turn. Combined with Magic Guard and Eviolite, it is the tool that gets the most out of a body that cannot hit hard.

The evolution forwards is triggered by an item rather than a level: use a Moon Stone whenever you want. Going backwards, Cleffa reaches this form when it levels up with friendship at 160 or higher. It grows at the Fast experience rate, so at the early levels it is ahead of almost any teammate.

Its habitat is the mountains, and its catch rate of 150 puts it in the comfortable middle of the table: neither the 45 of the starters nor the 255 of a first-route Pokémon.