Pokemon is a series of shows, trading cards and video game created by Game Freak and published by Nintendo. At the beginning of the series there were 151 different Pokemon each with different designs, types, stats, and moves, and with the release of the new game there of over 1,000. I had some interest in the series since I was first introduced to it in 2006ish when Pokemon Diamond was released, and when a new game comes out there is a good chance that I will play it. One of the main things that I wanted to look at in this project was type identity. What is the most popular type, type combination, do types have specific stat spreads?

Data Dictionary

This is the link to the original data set https://github.com/shahinrostami/pokemon_dataset/blob/master/pokemon_gen_1_to_8.csv

Analysis

What is the most common type

##    Grass     Fire    Water      Bug   Normal     Dark   Poison Electric 
##      117       82      153       90      126       70       77       72 
##   Ground      Ice    Fairy    Steel Fighting  Psychic     Rock    Ghost 
##       80       55       63       71       70      114       75       66 
##   Dragon   Flying 
##       72      117

Water is the most common type with 153 Pokemon having it, ice has the fewest number of Pokemon, which I found interesting as types that were added after it have more.

Stats By Type

I wanted to create something that showed the average stat spread of types because I would be able to see ‘type identity’, what are the things that differentiate types. Types like rock and steel have significantly higher attack and defense compared to their other stats, and the stats of other types. Psychic has higher special attack, fighting has higher attack.

Looking at types like ice, poison, and water were interesting because their averages were really close together. But when looking into it further, these types a wide variety of Pokemon in in them that have different roles.

Stat Total by Type

Stat total is all of a Pokemon’s stats added together, and is generally one of the more important factors when looking at competitive viability. The three big outliers seen in the graph are two Pokemon, the dragon and poison is an alternate form of a boss Pokemon Eternatus, and the one in flying is Mega Rayquaza, also an alternative form. I will talk about this later, but the stat totals for dragon and psychic types are likely being inflated by alternate forms of Pokemon with high stat totals.

Best and Worst Defensive typings

Based on a Pokemon’s typing they will take more or less damage based on the moving attacking them, if both of of a Pokemon types are resistant to an attacking move, they will take .25 of the original damage, .5 if only on type is resistant, if no types are resistant, the damage is neutral, and if a type is immune to a damage type, the multiplier is zero. For this I just took the sum of a Pokemon’s resistance numbers.

Best Defensive Typing

Shedinja having the lowest score(best) was amusing to me as I did not think that its ability would be taken into account. Shedinja has an ability called ‘wonder guard’ which gives it immunity to all non-super effective moves, it can only be hit by fire, flying, rock, ghost, and dark type attacks, and weather to balance for its ability, it will always have one health. As much as I like shedinja, it is an outlier as its ability is what is affecting its score rather than typing.

The next five all have the same type combination, steel and fairy, steel is a very strong defensive type, it has ten resistances and one immunity, when combined with fairy typing, it does loses one resistance and gains another immunity. Each of those Pokemon were very popular when they were legal in their formats. Looking at the rest of the list, it is mostly made up of steel types, ghost makes appearnces as it provides two immunities, and the rotoms’ have an ability that changes their score as well.

Worst Defensive Typing

The aspect that covers all of these pokemon is that they are quaduple weak to at least one move type, seven of the top ten are take four times damed from two move types, for the first two it is fighting and steel, for 3-5 and 9 and 10 it is fire and fighting, all of which are relativly common offensive moves.

Legendaries by Type

##    Grass     Fire    Water      Bug   Normal     Dark   Poison Electric 
##        6        9       10        3        6        4        5        8 
##   Ground      Ice    Fairy    Steel Fighting  Psychic     Rock    Ghost 
##        7        5       10       16       12       32        6        7 
##   Dragon   Flying 
##       23       16

Psychic types have the most legendaries, and it was by a significant enough margin so I looked into it, Psychic legendaries have many alternate forms, I counted twelve. Dragon also has several alternative forms, ten in total. The more I looked into it, the more I saw, that there were quite a few alternate forms, I’ll just say, for any group with more than ten, there is a good chance that that number is inflated by alternate forms or some other caveat like evolution.

Secondary Source

The website I scraped was https://www.pikalytics.com/, which is a website that collects and shares data about Pokemon and their usage in competitive games, it has information like their usage percentage, stats, type, moves and their usage percentage, popular teammates, tera types, abilities, and EV spreads (which were not there at the time of collection as the data has not been collected). I decided to collect only the top 50 most used Pokemon.

The Pokemon in that data set were the most used Pokemon at the time of collection in the Scarlet & Violet VGC 2023 Series on format.

Typing of 100 most used Pokemon

##    Grass     Fire    Water      Bug   Normal     Dark   Poison Electric 
##       11       11       14        3       11       10        6       11 
##   Ground      Ice    Fairy    Steel Fighting  Psychic     Rock    Ghost 
##        6        6       10       10       10       13        5       12 
##   Dragon   Flying 
##       10       11

Of the 100 most popular competitive Pokemon, water, psychic, and ghost have the most. The reason for there being a large number of water Pokemon on this list likely stems from two reasons, first being that there is a large pool of water type Pokemon to choose from. The second and likely main reason is the water types defenses, although it does not have many resistances like steel typing, it has very few weaknesses, the the only types that can attack it with bonus damage are grass and electric. Although there are a decent amount of grass type in the list, most of them are not used for offence, they are used for their support capabilities, realistically, only Meowscarada at rank 11 is effective at dealing with a pure water type, Amoonguss at rank 4 could, but it may be seen as a waste of its support capabilities.

My assumption for the increased popularity of psychic types would be their higher special attack stats, and ability to take advantage of things like trick room, which is a form of speed control, or psychic terrain which among other things boosts the power of psychic type attacks. The four most used psychic types all take advantage of these things, Armarougge and Indeedee-F are often paired together taking advantage of both psychic terrain and trick room when needed, Farigiraf is often used on teams that use trick room, and Oranguru is used to support its teammates.

Ghost types are popular for two main reasons, offence and defense. Ghost type attacks are able to attack all but two types effectively, as every other type match up is neutral at worst, ghost type attacks are useful as it is unlikely that you will deal reduced damage based on typing. Ghost is a popular defensive type as well, it is immune to 2 types of attacks, resists two, and only takes extra damage from two types, it is often considered good as a second typing.

Average Stats of Top 100 by Type

Stat Total by Type for Top 100

I like these graphs more that the once earlier in this project, the main reason being that it better exaggerators a type’s uses, identity, and player choice.

For the bar graphs, all of the graphs have more stats than the the previews graph of their type, it normally does not make sense to choose Pokemon that do the same or similar things worse than another. Other than in the case of Murkrow, there is little to no reason to use a not fully evolved Pokemon (Murkrow is used for its ability, which it loses upon evolution).

The dragon, ground, and poison graphs are the clearest examples to me of type identity becoming more clear. The dragon type graph shows players value its high attack, special attack, and speed, more than its defensive capabilities. With ground it becomes more clear that players value its defensive capabilities, as defense and special defense are higher compared to the previous graph. And for poison it is clear that players value/ take advantage of its special attack.

The second graph is illustrates that importance that player place on total stats. Some interesting outliers are at dark/flying ~400, that is Murkrow, which I mentioned earlier as being useful for its ability. At 670 normal, and 650 Water are two more Pokemon whos usage is affected for their ability, the 670 normal is Slaking, its ability is truant, which prevents it from moving every other turn to balance its stats. The water 650 is Palafin’s alternative form, which needs to be swithed out and back in to take effect, Palafin’s normal form is likely what causing the lower tail on water as well.

It was interesting to look at all this information, if I were to do it again, I would either choose a different website with different information, or I would use this website again when the additional informaiton was added.