Gengar

It lives in caves, but the Pokédex entries describe another home: someone else’s shadow. The image that comes up most often is a shape that overtakes you at night on an empty street and, when you look closely, turns out not to be your shadow but something imitating it. Hence its official category: the Shadow Pokémon.

The warning always reaches your skin before your eyes. Wherever it lurks, the temperature drops by 5 °C, and that sudden chill is the only sign it gives; one entry adds that, once it happens, there is no escape. According to the texts themselves, it is looking for souls to keep it company, and one entry is devoted to parents who threaten their children with it if they misbehave. Few species have the role of household bogeyman written into their official entry.

It completes a three-stage line that begins with Gastly, a shapeless gas, and passes through Haunter, a head with loose hands. Here, at last, there are legs, 1.5 metres and 40.5 kg. The progression is literal: each stage takes up more room in the physical world than the last, and only the final one weighs enough to cast a shadow of its own.

The 500 points are distributed with very little restraint. 130 Special Attack and 110 Speed take up the larger half of the budget; what remains is 60 HP, 60 Defense and 75 Special Defense. That means almost any neutral hit leaves it on the brink, and a second turn is rarely guaranteed.

Cursed Body, its only Ability, can disable the move that was just used against it. It is a stalling Ability on a Pokémon that cannot take hits, and it relies on the opponent hitting first, so most battles are played as though it did not have it.

Ghost and Poison defend better than those numbers suggest: immunity to Normal and Fighting, with Poison and Bug reduced to a quarter of their damage. The four weaknesses are the problem — Ground, Psychic, Ghost and Dark — and the latter three are all used by opponents that are just as fast as it. Offensively, the pairing performs worse: Steel is immune to Poison and Dark puts a stop to Ghost, so the coverage has to come from outside with Focus Blast.

Smogon has it ranked in RU in Scarlet and Violet. The three sets it documents start from different ideas: Nasty Plot with Shadow Ball and Sludge Wave; a wear-down version with Will-O-Wisp and Hex, which doubles its power against already affected targets; and another with Choice Scarf that uses Trick to hand the item to an opponent and leave them locked into a useless move. Destiny Bond, learned at level 54, is still the option for when it has already lost the exchange: if it goes down, it takes someone with it.

Amorphous Egg Group, the drawer where gases, sludge and anything without a fixed shape end up. The sex ratio is perfectly even, 50 % female, so there is no need to hunt for a specific sex to start a breeding line. The 20 incubation cycles amount to around 5355 steps.

It has no Egg Moves at all, which makes things much simpler: there is nothing to inherit from a parent, and one hatchling is worth exactly the same as any other.

The bottleneck lies elsewhere. Haunter evolves by trading and nothing else: no minimum level, no item and no additional condition. Gastly, on the other hand, evolves at level 25 and that’s it. It is the same barrier carried by Machamp, and it is still the reason many people finish the adventure with a Haunter on the team and slot 94 left blank.

Its habitat is the cave and its capture rate, 45, puts it among the difficult ones: it is best to lower its HP and put it to sleep before spending Poké Balls. In the wild, it may be holding a Spell Tag. It grows at a medium-slow rate and gives 3 effort points in Special Attack when defeated.