Meditite

A person sitting in a yoga pose: knees bent, feet together, hands resting on top and back straight. There’s no animal behind the design, nor a plant or object. There’s a pose—the meditator’s—with a blue body and a bulging white head that looks like a turban or an onion bulb. The official category confirms it without embellishment: Meditating Pokémon.

The Pokédex entries all revolve around the same routine. It trains deep in the mountains, increases its inner energy through meditation and, once its spiritual power grows enough, levitates. It eats one berry a day and nothing else; fasting is part of the training and sharpens its concentration.

And then there’s the joke hidden in one of the entries: when it meditates, it loses all concentration and becomes distracted, so its training never ends. An ascetic who fails at the one thing it does.

At 0.6 metres and 11.2 kilograms, it’s one of the smaller humanoids in the catalogue. It occupies the first half of a two-stage line: at level 37, it evolves into Medicham, which inherits the pose, the ability and the underlying problem.

Its 280 base stat total is among the lowest you’ll see, and it’s distributed in the worst possible way for something that wants to hit hard: 30 HP, 40 Attack, 40 Special Attack, 55 in both defences and 60 Speed. On paper, it neither deals damage nor takes hits.

Pure Power fixes that halfway. The ability doubles its Attack, so that 40 behaves like the stat of a fully evolved Pokémon, and it’s exclusive to this line on top of that: no other Pokémon has it. Its second ability, Telepathy, is the Hidden Ability and only matters in Doubles, where it prevents attacks from hitting its ally.

The movepool helps. High Jump Kick arrives at level 28 with 130 power, Focus Punch can be taught by TM with 150 and its usual accuracy issues, and Zen Headbutt, at level 25, covers the second type. Fake Out, an Egg Move, lets it open with priority and doubled power.

Everything else holds it back. With 30 HP, any neutral hit knocks it out, and the defensive profile of Fighting and Psychic is one of the worst in the game: just one resistance, Fighting, against four weaknesses—Flying, Rock, Ghost and Fairy. Offensively, the combination doesn’t quite work either: Ghost-types are immune to Fighting and Dark-types nullify Psychic. Outside formats restricted to unevolved Pokémon, where the doubled Attack does compensate for its frailty, there’s no reason to use it when Medicham is only one level away.

It belongs to the Human-Like Egg Group, with an even gender split: 50% female, which saves you the usual pilgrimage to find the mother. Its 20 Egg cycles work out at around 5355 steps, neither fast nor slow.

The Egg Move list is long and useful. It includes the three elemental punches—Fire Punch, Ice Punch and Thunder Punch—as well as Dynamic Punch, Bullet Punch and Psycho Cut. Fake Out is the one that changes things most with Pure Power. There are also three moves designed for Doubles: Quick Guard, which blocks priority attacks from the entire side, and Power Trick and Guard Swap, which pass its stats to its opponent.

Evolution has no trick or item involved: reach level 37 and that’s it. It grows at the Medium Slow rate, so it doesn’t fall behind the rest of the team. Each defeated specimen awards 1 Speed effort point.

Its habitat is the mountains, and in the wild it may be carrying a Twisted Spoon. Its catch rate, 180, puts it in the easier half of the table: a regular Poké Ball after lowering its health is usually enough, which is more dangerous than it sounds with 30 HP.