This isn’t a personal vendetta against ice-type Pokemon. In fact, ice types have been some of my favorite over the years (with my first favorite Pokemon of all time being Articuno). It would be awesome to be able to use the ice-type Pokemon in battles effectively, but the truth of the matter is that they just don’t make for an effective choice. Most often, my ice types find their way to the sidelines.

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One problem is that Game Freak seems set on trying to make ice-type Pokemon that are defensive. Unfortunately, ice-type Pokemon are tied for being the least resistant of all Pokemon, making them a poor defensive choice. Though ice is resistant to freezing, hail, and sheer cold, ice types are only resistant to other ice types. On offense, ice types are super effective against dragon, flying, grass, and ground. You would think that the ice types would at least be resistant to the types that they’re super effective against, but this has yet to be made a reality.

In addition to having almost no resistances, ice types do have a lot that they’re weak to, including fire, fighting, rock, and steel. If you combine all this together, this makes for a drastically unfair stack up against ice type Pokemon. They’ve created some decent ice-type Pokemon, but everything considered, they still don’t measure up against better picks for an offensive team.

One of the most obvious ways that they could improve upon ice-type Pokemon is to make them super effective against water. Considering that water-type Pokemon are resistant to fire, water, ice, and steel and only take major damage from electric and grass, making ice super effective against water would simply balance things out better. This would at least add value to an offensive ice team.

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The other most obvious fix for this would be to make ice resistant to more than just… ice. I’m not sure what Game Freak had in mind by designing ice Pokemon so poorly. So far in my findings, I’ve read that perhaps they were trying to capture the true nature of ice—that it appears strong but is actually quite fragile in reality. I think this argument could make sense for why ice Pokemon are more difficult to find than other types (typically appearing later in the games), but I can’t imagine that anyone thought this structure was truly a good idea from a gaming perspective. If this was indeed the case though, they could have just as easily taken a different approach; perhaps ice-type Pokemon are so hard to kill because even when ice shatters or melts, it’s not technically destroyed?

In any case, making ice types resistant to dragon, flying, grass, or ground would improve their performance immensely. Furthermore, they could change up some things to make more ice types easily accessible earlier in the games. Perhaps all they would need to do is add some accessible locations earlier on that don’t have to include legendaries, but can include ice Pokemon? I’m picturing some kind of special location early in the game that would actually make sense for ice Pokemon, but wouldn’t have to be difficult to get to or navigate through. Of course, this would entirely depend on where the next region is going to be located.

At the end of the day, something needs to change—or at least many people (myself included) would like it to. I’m tired of benching my ice Pokemon and not being able to use some of my favorites, especially when it seems like there are such simple solutions.

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