Blueberry Academy Elite Four Member

Hii so i recently started training a steel type and I need some advice. Specifically a low-level Pawniard. I didn't realize before catching her how much of an expense whetstones would be, and I was wondering if you know a good way to find them outdoors maybe? Or get them in any way other than just buying them?

I'm sure I can figure out the money if I have to, but since they maintain their blades on their own in the wild there's gotta be a good alternative right?

Ah, well, Pawniard and other steel types are hardly my area of experience as they neither frequent my region nor my personal preference. However a friend of mine, Casimir’s husband, does keep a kingambit, and from the looks of it quite a well groomed one. I reached out to him for his expertise on the subject- and got quite the lecture to my surprise. Not that I was complaining, it was quite interesting. The following is a rephrasing of the key points, for anything more detailed I would recommend asking someone that works with this line directly, or perhaps a blacksmith of sorts.

Natural whetstones are entirely possible to use, Novaculite is the most commonly used whetstone material, if you have any idea where to source that stone naturally. There are a large number of deposits in regions like Orre, Johto, Kanto, Hoenn, Sinnoh, and some parts of Southern Kalos. They’re resistant to erosion, meaning that deposits often sit on the top layers of soil and don’t require intense mining to obtain. If you don’t have access to novaculite then there’s also water stones or artificial ones. 

In practice you really just need to find a rock of appropriate grit in order to shave metal from the blade’s edge. To use a natural whetstone effectively you need to use a slurry in order to speed up the process. You create slurry with a smaller stone that you rub against your larger stone along with water. It has the added benefit of preventing the pores of your base stone from becoming embedded with metal pieces from the blade. 

If you have an idea of the grit you want the stone to be for sharpening, you can achieve that grit more easily by prepping the stone with sandpaper beforehand.

Assuming you maintain your stone well and break off a substantial enough chunk, you will not need to replace it nearly as often as you will your slurry stones. You can utilize surface refreshing techniques in order to restore the natural properties of the whetstone. Keep in mind that you should not be over sharpening your Pawniard or using your whetstone improperly. A single whetstone, yes even synthetic ones, are intended to last you years. If you are using a pokemon grade whetstone and burning through them, there’s a higher likelihood that you are misunderstanding how to use your current whetstone, rather than needing constant replacements. You shouldn’t need a massive amount of pressure to sharpen a Pawniard’s blade and shouldn’t move too quickly. Just try to find a comfortable angle for your pawniard and use smooth even strokes. 

many canine pokemon are used to track via scent for this reason.

this was a debate? it looked more like people were trying to decide how someone elses phobia worked ( at least from what i saw? unless there were other posts)

well, i hate to break it to ya anon, but taxonomy is... a bit like gender. constructed by people who want to organize life into tiny ridged boxes, while being way too complex to truly do so

for example. a remoraid is less related to a luvdisk than it is to whimipod. and yet we call only the former two fish. by all taxonomical logic, reptile pokemon are birds. sharpedo are barely fish. this shit is FAKE. helpful for describing what a pokemon looks like and give you a general idea of what to expect when you care for one, but its all just guesswork and superstition in the end!!

Did you know that archeops was predicted before a fossil specimen of it was actually discovered? By using the morphology of two specimen we were already aware of at the time we were able to predict that there was likely a transitional species between them. Using that information we could pinpoint generally where and when they lived, giving us an idea of where in the rock layer to look for their fossils.

These things are not guesswork, they are not superstition, and I would not be able to do my job if they were. No you can't necessarily make predictions and categorize species without sufficient data, but the same can be said about any science without diminishing its purpose. Not to mention the fact that pokemon have extremely volatile DNA we have only just begun to understand, meaning that any work with establishing ancestry and a history of evolution between species requires quite a bit of scrutiny. I won't pretend these things are uncontroversial or that they are set in stone, but they aren't fake.

With the advent of DNA testing these categories become less and less "arbitrary", though still up for debate due to rapid changes caused by evolution within a species. People tend to forget that we were only able to obtain DNA sample of a mew in the 1990s. Mega evolution was first published about in scientific journals within the last two decades. We've only scratched the surface of what makes pokemon evolve and change the way they do as rapidly as they do. Our understanding of pokemon changes up every few years.

Also reptile pokemon are not birds, you have that backwards. Birds came after reptiles, meaning that if anything bird pokemon would be reptiles. That being said evolutionary taxonomy means that they would be excluded from their ancestor's classification anyways. It merely means their lineage arose from a reptilian ancestor.