Magcargo

Fifty-five kilos packed into eighty centimetres of height. The density has an explanation: what looks like a shell is rock, and underneath is a lava body that, according to Ruby’s Pokédex entry, sits at around 1000 °C.

It didn’t have that shell made separately. The Pokédex entries insist that it is its own skin, hardened as it cooled, and that it is so cracked it would fall apart at a touch; to rebuild it, it has to climb back into magma. The rest of what is said about it follows from there. The flames running through its body show through the cracks in that crust. Water evaporates before it can touch it, and when it rains, the drops that graze it turn to steam and raise a dense fog around it.

It is the second and final form of the Slugma line, a magma slug with no legs, no bones and nothing to contain it. When it evolves, it doesn’t gain limbs: it gains a crust. The official category, Lava Pokémon, describes less than the design does, which amounts to taking a garden snail and replacing its slime with molten rock.

Its habitat is the mountain, and the 2 Defense points awarded for defeating it make that distribution pretty clear.

430 points with a terrible spread. The 120 Defense is the only good number on the sheet, and the 60 HP partly undermines it: a wall with that much health holds up for far less than its Defense suggests. Attack sits at 50, Speed at 30—among the slowest in its generation—and its 90 Special Attack is the second-best thing it has.

Fire and Rock is one of the worst defensive combinations in the game. Water and Ground hit for ×4, while Fighting hits for ×2. In return, it resists Fire at ×0,25 and halves damage from Normal, Flying, Poison, Bug, Ice and Fairy. The problem is that the two types that split it in half are also the two that show up most often.

None of its three abilities help. Magma Armor prevents freezing, which is not something a Fire type has to worry about. Flame Body burns on contact and at least punishes physical attackers. Weak Armor, its hidden ability, lowers Defense when it takes a physical hit—taking away the one thing it has—in exchange for raising a Speed of 30.

It learns Shell Smash upon evolving, at level 0 on the list. On paper, it is the move that would fix it; in practice, it doubles 30 Speed and drops both defenses on something with 60 HP and two ×4 weaknesses. Smogon has it in ZU.

Where it does work is in a normal playthrough, as a physical wall with its own upkeep: Stealth Rock by TM, Will-O-Wisp to burn anything that hits it head-on, Recover at level 47 and Earth Power from level 1 for Steel and Rock types switching in.

Amorphous Egg Group, and that’s it, which pairs it with ghosts and blobs before other shelled creatures. The gender ratio is fifty-fifty, so raising your own line doesn’t depend on finding the rare female.

Twenty hatching cycles, around 5355 steps. The irony is that its two non-hidden abilities, Magma Armor and Flame Body, are precisely the ones that halve egg-hatching time for the team: it is more useful as an incubator for other species than as a breeder for its own.

It inherits eight moves from the egg, and two deserve attention. Inferno is the most powerful Fire-type special attack it can receive this way, with 100 power. Guard Swap trades Defense and Special Defense with the opponent, an unusual move that can be used in either direction with 120 and 80 of its own. The other six are Smokescreen, Acid Armor, Curse, Rollout, Stockpile and Memento.

The evolution has no trick to it: Slugma reaches level 38 and that’s it. No item, time of day, friendship or specific location. It grows at a medium pace, the most predictable of the six.

It is found in the mountains and its catch rate is 75. Neither trivial nor locked down: above the 45 of a starter and a long way from the 255 of what you catch on the first route.