A Really Stupid Article About Pokemon Types

This is going to sound dumb, so bear with me. There are too many Pokemon types. Like, way too many. To the point that some of them are overlapping each other. And honestly? It might be cool to see a Pokemon type shake up in the future, so I’m just gonna go with this.

Really, I don’t even have a place to stand when it comes to Pokemon and Pokemon types and balancing and all that. My first Pokemon game was Pokemon Go where the only real meta is “high attack and a type that’s super effective” and I had no idea how to play the Pokemon Card game when I was little. But it was Pokemon cards that got me thinking about this. Specifically, it was a Shiny Koffing card I bought for my brother as a present.

The type of that Koffing is Psychic. Rather than being a Poison type.

A lot of Poison type Pokemon in the card game turned out to be Psychic types. Bug types get turned into Grass types and Ice types get turned into Water types. The original card game didn’t add Dragon, Dark and Steel cards until later generations had come out! I know that because I still have my really old Dark Dragonair Pokemon card and that’s a normal type rather than Dragon type. Heck, there’s still no Ghost type Pokemon cards, all Ghost types get lumped under Psychic.

In fact, the Pokemon card game only has 11 types compared to the 18 that normal Pokemon has – it combines the 17 normal types into Grass (Grass, Bug, Poison), Fire, Water (Water, Ice), Lightning (Electricity), Fighting (Fighting, Rock, Ground), Psychic (Psychic, Ghost, Poison), Darkness (Dark), Metal (Steel), Dragon, Fairy and Colourless (Normal, Flying, Dragon in earlier iterations).

Now, I was going to go on a rant about how we could cut down the 18 Pokemon types into less types, but frankly, the Pokemon trading card game actually already does a really good job of that. It actually goes further than I was willing to go. In my own system, I would have kept Ground as its own type and only merge Rock into it. The only thing I would have done as a bit more of an extreme option is to merge Dark and Steel together, or perhaps move Steel to Colourless/Normal and Dark into Psychic. I also haven’t really thought about weaknesses and resistances but that’s a whole other kettle of fish.

But really, I think the trading card game does a much better job of clearing things up. 11 is still quite a few types, but it’s better than 18, I think. It also deals with issues like there being hardly any Ice types and a large number of Pokemon being Normal and Flying or Normal and some other type. It also means you have far fewer weaknesses and resistances that you need to worry about.

All this talk about types though is pretty pointless. It’s basically not going to happen and frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw more new types in the future. I don’t know what types, since there are 18 already, but you never know…