The Re-Typed Chart

What could be changed about the Type Chart to make it work better for Pokemon's future?

0:00 Intro
3:59 Understanding the Chart
6:30 My Edits
15:47 The Deep Dive Bit
23:52 The Last of the Good Stuff

Extra Research:

Music:
“Multiverse” and “Music Box, Harp & Dulcimer” by Wintergatan

[sandrosk]

Steel is super effective against fairy because in European cultures especially the main way of dealing with the supernatural is with iron, because it symbolises industrialism and the disconnect that forms from nature as humanity progresses technologically. This can be seen best in how werewolves are weak to silver bullets. Great video and I appreciate lots of the changes you suggested. I personally always wondered why fighting wasn’t either super effective or resistant to itself and seeing you change that made me finally able to be at peace

[techstuff]

Bugs have historically always required our best poisons to kill, if it _can_ kill a bug, it *WILL* kill everything else.

[ryanmahon]

I actually love the lack of perfect loops in the type chart. I think the asymmetry of Pokémon is great and truly valuable to the health of the game. Having imperfect loops makes them each feel different as types rather than a reskin of the fire water grass. Cool video!

[elmsigreen]

Instead of making Fire and Ice neutral towards each other, I think I would make them super effective against each other. That's a unique interaction that we don't have yet. Bug and Fighting resist each other but no two types are super effective towards each other. And to buff Ice a little, I would make Ice be immune to itself since that is also something that no other type does.
I love that Bug is immune to Psychic, it makes sense. And removing Steel's resistance and Dark's immunity are also great ideas to make Psychic just a bit better

[maybeaferret]

I love the idea of Ice, Poison, Electric, Dark as it would represent CMYK to Fire, Grass, Water's RGB!

[neversparky]

5:30 One interesting thing is that with this loop, you can actually have a loop within a loop. Rock, Fire, and Steel create a loop with each other, but also all 3 are simultaneously strong against Ice and weak against Ground. This could potentially be used for some neat gameplay tricks, such as a first gym that's ground type, and encouraging the player to search a snowy forrest or mountain for counters to said ground types!

[grey-c]

2:36 See, there's a reason why Pokémon doesn't need any new types, even outside of a game design/balance perspective. Every one of these concepts (aside from maybe ooze) is already represented by a currently existing type

Magic: Fairy, and sometimes Psychic
Acid: Poison
Void: Dark
Crystal: Rock
Divine: Fairy again

The vast majority of things that could be made into types are either already represented by a type or are already an existing archetype of move like sound

[apaperboy]

Me and a friend were talking about making Normal super-effective against Fairy. From a mechanics side, normal deserves a super effective offense and fairy could stand to have a third weakness. From flavor side, the way we see it, normal is like "the real world" which starkly denies fairy tales. Making a Normal pokemon essentially a rebuttal to the existence of Fairies

[brendowego]

Interestingly, you actually removed a perfect loop in grass, ground, poison. I'm not against that change, I'm just pointing it out.

I like the idea of some games using less types, since it'll mess with the meta for that specific game without having to make knock on changes. I could see a tropical island region that has a volcano in the middle, leading to a lack of ice types. Or a cavernous region that has few flying and grass types.

[Lotloxa]

I really don't think any game with only 3 types could really be considered a Pokemon game anymore. Games with only a single triangular perfect loop just end up pushing the strongest stat sticks to the top anyways, which is ideally something elemental weaknesses and resistances should be discouraging. It would also shut out dual types from the game and any access to coverage moves would sort of defeat the purpose of a perfect triangle and make speed and power the unequivocal best.
The reduced type numbers and lack of dual types in the TCG could be an interesting starting point. The way they handle weaknesses, resistances and the occasional immunity reminds me of more standard JRPGs where each enemy might have their own unique spread, with general rules for certain classes/species. I'm not sure that's particularly helpful or a direction I want pokemon to go in, but it could be an example of how to scale down various systems in the game, such as going from 4 to 2 moves, to accommodate a smaller chart.

That being said, I do like the idea of limited types by game (Especially with spinoffs. Gates to Infinity and Pokemon Conquest had very limited rosters and obvious winners from lack of counters) and even an expanded type-chart to add into the rotation.


Also, you highlighted Ground is neutral to Ground at 12:35, meanwhile Ground hitting Rock neutrally is not marked. Good thing you covered every type's changes in full later!
The high prevalence of certain type pairings is also worth noting for type changes, such as Poison/Grass being 4x resistant to Fairy and now having dual-STAB coverage for any secondary typing on a Fairy. (Although, in general, getting four extra weaknesses is already pretty damning, especially since you point out Grass is one of the most common types.) Rock/Ground types can cheer for losing one of their 4x weaknesses. I agree with Bugs getting a much needed buff (and Poison too, since their main selling point is Fairy coverage and defending against the status), and curiously I don't think there's any major implications for Poison/Bug types.

Flying/Normal stayed exactly the same too XD

[umwha]

12:40 This is very interesting. Very interesting choice not to make them all balance to 0. When I did it myself I made them all balance to 0, and only kept interactions that make sense. It was quite a job.

[teslobo]

I like some of these ideas but I think it might focus a bit too much on the big picture. For individual types, you kinda want their matchups to reflect their nature and there was probably opportunities to examine the type concepts in isolation to determine what could help flesh out a type's personality.

You made fighting resist itself but what if you made it weak against itself instead to evoke recklessness and competition in fighting types going toe-to-toe? You could also bring out the warrior archetype in them by having them be super effective against dragons.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I also didn't spot any attempts to make two types super effective against one another - candidates for that could be ghost and psychic: mortals trying to master the supernatural and the supernatural in turn proving how dangerous that ambition is. Fire and ice are also self explanatory candidates for this, but maybe also steel and electric.

Of course you can also make resistances add to a type's personality. Steel is the obvious one but bug also gets a shoutout for resisting fighting and ground, the two types with a reputation for reliably hitting most targets at least neutrally, which gives bug that sense of a pest you can't fight conventionally.

I like the broad structuring of these type loops but I think there's some work you can do to have the macro details work in concert with the micro details. What should it feel like to play a particular type? Gen 1 set an arguably ugly precedent of using base stats and moves to answer this question: rocks feel bulky because all the rock types have high defense, bugs feel weak because we made them all weak. As the generations have gone on and pokemon within a type diversified, you don't really feel that same sense of belonging between Golem and, say, Lycanroc. Moves and stats flesh out individuals but I don't think it should carry the weight of a whole type, yknow?

[survivordave]

It has never made sense to me that Steel isn't weak to Electric...the logic behind Water being weak to Electric applies just as well to Steel.

Also how the heck do you only have triple digit subscribers? Your content is absolutely fantastic, very thoughtful and incredibly edited. You're a real hidden gem and you've got yourself a new subscriber :)

[azothlegacy]

Really liked the changes and would be cool to see this happening in a real pokémon game. The idea of grass being weak against dark doesn't feel right to me. I think the dark type suffers a lot from the way its name has been translated. The dark type is to be intended as the evil and mischevious type and not as the "abscence of light" type ahaha but that's was just your idea and everything else was very good!

[Siders]

This is something I used to think about a lot, and I really like your changes! ❤

[lipika]

Some of the changes I felt were unneeded such as Fire not having any relationship with ice. Ice doing neutral damage to Fire (like in G1) is fine, but Fire not hitting it super effectively though? Things such as Electric dealing 1/2× to Rock while becoming strong against Steel, Fighting being resistant to itself are alright enuf though.
1 crucial thing u forgot to mention is traits & benefits a type can have: terrains, weather, Grass' immunity to Leech Seed & powder moves, abilities, movepools (Normal having tons of elemental coverage) & how good moves can be for a certain type (Scald for Water-types, Draco Meteor for Dragon), Ghosts can't be trapped starting with G6, moves that a said type can usually get (Water-types being blessed with Ice moves, Dragons typically get Fire moves), rarity of a type (as u mentioned Grass being quite common), & so much more. There's a lot to consider when balancing the type chart & I think u did a ok job. Hard to say how balanced it's in practice by just looking at it.

[Ariamaki]

This misses most of the themes and conceptual reasons behind type matchups, fails to create interesting spots with full immunities or double-effective matchups, and nobody who says "scissors paper rock" in that order can be trusted.

[Frstee]

I never got why steel doesn't resist fighting, armor literally exists so that you can take less damage from physical attacks, taking extra damage because you put on armor makes no sense

[saltlakeatrocity]

As someone who exclusively cares about fixing the typechart for competitive pokemon purposes, and is wholly indifferent to the typechart's effect on mainline games—many of these changes have drastic domino effects that would be disastrous for competitive pokemon. By "disastrous" of course what I mean is that your changes would cause the pool of viable pokemon who even "exist" in the first place (i.e.: have any reason to treat like they even exist at all) to shrink to a fraction of what it is now. Alot of this comes from the fact that buffing a type's offensive capacity doesn't really buff that pokemon as much as it does buff the most defensively-sound pokemon that know moves of that type. Making fairy type weak to bug type doesn't make bug type pokemon much stronger—but DOES make fairy type pokemon afraid of every non-bug type pokemon out there that learns U-Turn. Buffing a type's defensive capacity goes alot further to actually make types stronger. Here are some examples of some of the negative effects your proposed changes might create:

For example, fire types being weak to stealth rock by itself means that fire type pokemon are among the worst of the worst from the get-go—and have a ton of trouble just existing. Most of the time their fairy resistance is the only thing giving them a competitive use-case that even lets whatever other advantages a given fire type might have be explored in the first place—and even then if a fire type pokemon isn't the single best fire type available its not worth the stealth rock weakness to even consider. Worsening fire defenses even further by removing the very valuable fairy resistance—without an even more significant buff to compensate—is akin to deleting all fire type pokemon from the game.

Ground type pokemon are most-of-the-time absolutely terrible, having only three resistances and weaknesses to quite possibly all three of the most common attacking types in the game. Other than ground types like Landorus, Great Tusk, or Excadrill that are paired with such strong secondary typings and are given such strong utility to justify the risk being ground type comes with—ground types never even see the light of day. The one thing giving it a use-case despite being an atrocious typing overall is its offensive capacity. I see you modestly improved their defense ability, but since they were already at a deficit it is nerfing an already struggling type.

There were a handful of other such changes, but mostly along these lines. As someone who theorycrafts type chart changes ALOT, one thing i've learned is that adding or removing weaknesses is a very volatile means of rebalancing types with the most dramatic domino effect. Its generally better to rebalance by simply adding or removing resistances. And even then, removing resistances can be volatile. A good tool is to keep track of every possible combination of the 18 types and see if your changes have increased or decreased the number of those combinations with 5 or more weaknesses and/or double weaknesses. If you have, its probably time to go back to the drawing board a bit. But then again, our goals are vastly different from one another so there's also that—but I can't help but wonder if there might be some venn diagram overlap between our two goals.

[robertfox]

Very well made video, deserves thousands more views than it currently has. Hope you get the recognition you deserve.