#rocktypes

Lycanroc comes in two varieties, one associated with the day, and the other the night.  The way its path is chosen is a new one for split evolutions: Rockruff evolves differently depending on which version of the game you have, Sun or Moon, though wild Lycanroc of the opposite form can be found on both games.  This is put down to the “influence” of Solgaleo and Lunala, which could mean almost anything and doesn’t appear to have any effect on other Pokémon in Alola.  In future generations we can probably expect this to become a straightforward day/night fork like Espeon and Umbreon.  Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon are planned to add a new Dusk form with characteristics of both, which requires a unique Rockruff with the Own Tempo ability to evolve between 5 and 6 pm, on either game.  The solar “Midday” form is wolf-like, and feels to me like a more “natural” evolution of Rockruff than the lunar form, keeping Rockruff’s colour scheme and emphasising his most distinctive feature, the “collar” of stones.  The lunar “Midnight” form is werewolf-like, as hinted by Lycanroc’s name, which seems to derive from “lycanthrope” (from the Greek λύκος/lukos, wolf, and ἄνθρωπος/anthropos, person); the same connotation goes through all of his alternative names in other languages, some of them via the French loup-garou.  Modern werewolves tend to have a specific laundry list of traits like vulnerability to silver and the ability to transfer their curse via a bite, which are not properties Lycanroc shares, although his posture could be taken from the human/wolf hybrid forms of many modern werewolves, and of course he has the most important feature of all: a connection to moonlight (werewolves transform when exposed to the light of the full moon).  He also gets eyes that glow blood-red in battle, for an added sinister air.

The lunar form seems like a much more drastic change from Rockruff, with a shift to a hunched but bipedal posture and an obvious colour change from brown and cream to a striking crimson, as well as the replacement of the stone “collar” with an impressive and luxuriant white mane.  I’m not sure how I feel about one of these evolved forms being clearly so much more divergent than the other – like the solar form is the “true” one and the lunar form is “deviant” – because the whole context of their links to the two versions of the game implies that they should be “balanced,” equal and opposite, but both obviously natural progressions from Rockruff, in the way the “Eeveelutions” are.  This comes through quite strongly with the twilight form, which you can tell is supposed to be a merging of the sun and moon forms’ traits by the way they talk about it, but comes across as much closer to the sun form (and might even work as a Mega Evolution of the sun form).  I’m not sure whether the design has messed up the ideas it’s trying to convey, or I’ve just misunderstood what it’s trying to convey.

Where the sun and moon forms do act as opposites is in their personalities.  Lycanroc’s solar form, provided it is raised well, retains and even accentuates Rockruff’s loyalty and sense of duty, but becomes disciplined and honourable instead of playful and affectionate.  The lunar form, on the other hand, becomes aggressive, violent, and uncontrollable, with a battle style that centres on goading opponents into reckless attacks and then crushing them with overwhelming force.  The Sun and Moon website is careful to point out, however, that a good relationship with this Pokémon in the Rockruff stage will carry over to a strong bond with a lunar Lycanroc.  It further claims that Rockruff will often leave their trainers for a short time to evolve (regardless of which evolution it takes), which could be a reference to “lone wolves” that have left their packs to avoid competition with their parents and siblings.  This is generally a temporary status; a lone wolf can find a mate and start a new pack, and Rockruff will return to their trainers after evolving.  However, there are also wolves that remain solitary indefinitely, and there is a kind of mystique that surrounds them as symbols of individualism and dark, brooding strength.  That seems to fit Midnight Lycanroc – but it’s actually Midday Lycanroc that are explicitly said to hunt on their own rather than in packs.  I don’t think there’s any official word on lunar Lycanroc at all – on the one hand, their sociopathic disposition seems like it wouldn’t lend itself to complex social behaviour, and in the absence of any other information maybe we should assume they act like solar Lycanroc… but on the other hand, maybe it makes just as much sense to assume the reverse, since these forms are paired opposites.  The description we’re given on the website says that Midday Lycanroc “lives solo in mountains and deserts, not creating a pack… and they live without interfering with one another, which helps to avoid unnecessary fights,” which seems like it’s meant as a contrast with a Pokémon that does create a pack and embraces unnecessary fights – otherwise, why else would you mention it?  Maybe Midnight Lycanroc have super-complex social structures mediated by constant supremacy duels?  I don’t know, and I don’t think Lycanroc wants to tell me.

The distinction between the solar and lunar Lycanroc forms’ battle roles is mercifully straightforward.  Both are powerful physical attackers with mediocre defences, which is not a terrible thing for Rock-types to be, since Rock hits a lot of things for super-effective damage.  The Midday form is much faster than the decidedly average Midnight form, but that extra speed comes at a fairly steep cost to its defences, leaving Midday Lycanroc quite fragile, while Midnight Lycanroc can at least claim to be passable.  No word yet on the new twilight incarnation, but it seems like a reasonable guess that it will have stats midway between the other two.  The solar Lycanroc, then, is fairly specialised towards a sweeper or revenge-killer mindset, whereas the lunar form’s natural inclinations are a bit less clear.  Each form gets three attacks that aren’t accessible to the other: Quick Guard, Quick Attack, and the signature move Accelerock for Midday; Counter, Reversal and Taunt for Midnight (at least, in theory – Taunt isn’t on Midday’s level-up list, but is available as a TM, and to add insult to injury, Midday is probably the better Pokémon to use it because of his high speed).

Midnight Lycanroc’s exclusive moves produce exactly the fighting style described in his flavour text: forcing foes to attack directly with Taunt, turning their physical strength against them with Counter, and becoming ever more incensed as the battle goes on with Reversal.  The only problem is that Counter and Reversal are not great attacks.  Reversal requires you to hang around at 1 HP, or close to it, for multiple turns to get any benefit, while Counter will probably only work once in a battle, has to be timed perfectly if you want to actually kill something with it, and doesn’t do anything to special attackers.  Neither of them are actually terrible moves, just very tricky to use to their full potential, and if you’re going to take either, Lycanroc should probably be equipped with a Focus Sash to improve your odds of surviving a strong attack with 1 HP so you can retaliate at full force.  The only really important thing on the Midday form’s exclusive list is Accelerock, best described as a Rock-type Quick Attack.  I’m not entirely certain a Pokémon as fast as Midday Lycanroc actually needs a move like this, especially since his best ability, Sand Rush, doubles his already impressive speed in a sandstorm.  On the other hand, Lycanroc is not a Pokémon who is prone to having a super-packed moveset, so you can just stick Accelerock in as insurance against something even faster than you, or with priority moves of its own (Talonflame, I’m looking at you).

Details are still sketchy on Dusk Lycanroc.  We know he gets both Accelerock and Counter, though it remains to be seen whether he’ll have access to Quick Guard, Reversal, etc, and again, we don’t know exactly what his stats will look like.  We do know he’ll have the useful Tough Claws ability, a hefty +33% damage bonus for “contact” attacks – this doesn’t apply to Stone Edge, Lycanroc’s primary attack, but will significantly improve most of his other physical attacks, making it probably the best ability available to Lycanroc of any form.  Unfortunately, without knowing his exact stat profile, it’s hard to know how this will affect Dusk Lycanroc’s fighting style right now.

Lycanroc gets Swords Dance, and unlike most of the Alola Pokémon we’ve seen together so far, he’s actually fast enough to make good use of it – or, at least, his solar incarnation is.  In theory that should suggest a pretty straightforward moveset; Sand Rush for your ability with some kind of set-up from another Pokémon, Swords Dance, and then three solid attacks.  The trouble is, Lycanroc doesn’t really have three solid attacks.  Your primary attack is Stone Edge, which is great; then there’s Crunch, which is nothing to write home about but basically fine, and then… well, there’s Brick Break, which combos well with Crunch but is starting to get on the low side for power, and there’s Fire Fang and Thunder Fang, which are so weak you’re basically taking them just to victimise Pokémon with a double-weakness, like Scizor.  This is far from an inspiring movepool.  Still, at least solar Lycanroc’s strategy is straightforward.  The poor lunar bastard isn’t fast enough for a Swords Dance sweep to make sense, doesn’t get Sand Rush either, and without Accelerock or Quick Attack, his only priority attack is Sucker Punch, which suffered a power nerf in Sun and Moon, has limited PP, and can be countered by using non-damaging moves.  Lycanroc can also learn Rock Polish, so you can boost his speed that way, but then it becomes almost impossible to justify having Swords Dance as well, and Lycanroc’s base attack stat isn’t high enough to outweigh his lacklustre physical movepool without some kind of boost.  What Midnight Lycanroc does have over his diurnal counterpart is No Guard as a hidden ability, which sets the accuracy of all his moves – as well as all moves that target him – to 100%.  For the most part, the benefit of this is having a 100%-accurate Stone Edge.  That’s not nothing; in fact it’s pretty awesome, but it’s also not Machamp’s Dynamicpunch (the traditional use for No Guard), or even Golurk’s, and remember that it also makes incoming attacks 100% accurate against you (Focus Blast, anyone?).

This is normally the point at which I would describe other options that are probably terrible but at least seem amusing enough to be worth mentioning; the trouble is that not only have I still not come up with anything worth doing with the Midnight form, Lycanroc in general just doesn’t have all that many interesting options.  He is, at present, one of only a handful of Pokémon that can learn Stealth Rock within generation VII (though a bunch of older Pokémon have access to it from the Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby move tutors), which could be important if you don’t have the older games, but it’s a good bet there’ll be a Stealth Rock tutor in Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon.  Bulk Up is there, but I doubt even the slightly tankier Midnight form really has any business trying a Bulk Up set, since Lycanroc has no healing.  And… I honestly think that’s about it.  Lycanroc’s overall movepool is surprisingly shallow and I’m not sure there’s more than one or two basic strategies for each form.

  There are two kinds of barnacles, both of which are actually crustaceans, distantly related to animals like shrimp and crabs.  The ones we normally tend to think of when we hear the word ‘barnacle’ are the sessile kind, which from the outside look like nothing so much as tiny lumps of rock with wide, flat beaks.  Searching for images on Google will turn up countless pictures of these things in huge colonies, encrusting stones, the hulls of ships, the bodies of living whales… pretty much anything, really.  When submerged in water, the ‘beak’ opens up and the barnacle flails a dozen or so hairy appendages around to ensnare the microorganisms upon which it feeds.  Binacle is not one of those.  Binacle is one of the less well-known stalked barnacles, which anchor themselves to their chosen support by a long fleshy stalk and flail their entire bodies around in the water hoping to catch food in their mouths.  The result is – functionally, if not anatomically – a little grabbing hand with a hungry face on it, attached to a rock by a long bendy arm, which of course is exactly what Binacle is.  In particular, the species known as the Japanese goose barnacle bears an uncanny resemblance.  ‘Goose barnacle’ is a trivial name given to the whole order of stalked barnacles, and perhaps the most disappointing thing about them is that they do not in fact have anything to do with geese.  They were believed by mediaeval Europeans to be the larval form of a type of bird, known for this reason as the barnacle goose, which migrates to the Arctic in spring to breed, and so was not usually seen to lay eggs (although one German bishop, sceptical of these claims, did manage to breed them in captivity) – resulting in a convenient loophole that allowed Christians to eat barnacle geese during Lent, and on other occasions when meat was forbidden, since they weren’t really birds.  None of this is really relevant to Binacle, who has nothing to do with geese either (and this is perhaps the most disappointing thing about it), but I thought you ought to know.

  The things I learn while writing this $#!t, I swear…

  Funnily enough, Binacle’s lifestyle is actually nothing like a barnacle’s.  They aren’t sessile, for one thing; their head-claw-things are strong enough that they can just drag their rocks with them along the beach as they search for seaweed and other detritus to eat.  Why do they have rocks at all, then?  I can only assume the answer is “for bludgeoning things.”  Each of the standard Binacle that we fight and capture in the games consists of two individuals anchored to the same stone, but apparently they can and do have disagreements that result in one of them relocating, so presumably solitary ones also exist in nature – and maybe ‘triplets’ too, although two seems to be their preferred organisation, for whatever reason.  I wonder how this is supposed to play into their gender?  In the real world, each individual barnacle is either male or female, but a pair of Binacle functions as a single Pokémon for breeding purposes and the species as a whole has a 50/50 gender ratio.  I can only suppose that males hang out together and females do likewise, or maybe they naturally breed in groups of four.  Anyway, Binacle is a pair of barnacles sharing a rock.  How do you make a barnacle interesting?  Answer: evolve it into a seven-headed barnacle golem (each of its two legs and four arms is a head, similar to Binacle’s original two, although apparently one-eyed this time, and we can’t really see what the feet are like – look, I just really enjoy typing the phrase ‘seven-headed barnacle golem,’ okay?).  It’s… honestly I don’t know what to call Barbaracle, but it’s certainly a creative direction for this design.  Even gets the whole ‘creepy hands with eyes’ thing going.  Very nice.  The Pokédex seems pretty clear that the original two Binacle divide into seven, but I still wonder whether it’s also possible to create a Barbaracle by assembling seven Binacle – or whether these seven, like the original two, sometimes fight and split up, since they explicitly still have minds of their own.  I can imagine them arguing over which ones have to be the feet this week, and I hope against hope for an anime episode where Ash encounters an angry, snarling Barbaracle head that’s been abandoned by its long-suffering arms and legs so everyone can learn a Valuable Lesson about teamwork and leadership.  Finally for today, I do want to call out a rather silly line from the Pokédex: “When they evolve, two Binacle multiply into seven.  They fight with the power of seven Binacle.”  Well… I should bloody well hope so, since there are seven of them.  Then again, I suppose they may have felt that clarification was necessary, since apparently a pair of Binacle can only manage to fight with the power of one Binacle.  It’s times like this that I almost think it would be worth it to learn to read Japanese, just to cross-reference these things with the originals.  Almost (don’t look at me like that; I’ve got three other languages to practice).

  As is the case for most Pokémon who learn it, Barbaracle’s battle role is to no small extent defined by Shell Smash, a sort of sweeper-in-a-can move that weakens your defences but also doubles your power and speed.  Barbaracle’s not the fastest Pokémon out there, but after a Shell Smash it’s certainly fast enough.  You can, if you so desire, even combine this with a White Herb to keep Barbaracle’s decent defences intact.  The modus operandi, then, is to find something that can’t kill you immediately, use Shell Smash as it either runs away or flails at you uselessly, and then mercilessly brutalise everything in your path.  Barbaracle is much faster than everything else with Shell Smash apart from Cloyster, and to further aid it in this endeavour it gets a lovely ability, one shared only by Mega Charizard X, Mega Aerodactyl, and apparently the soon-to-be Mega Metagross; it’s called Tough Claws, which gives a 1/3 bonus to the power of all moves that make physical contact with the enemy – which is not the same thing as ‘physical attacks’; be careful.  It unfortunately doesn’t include Barbaracle’s best Rock-type attacks, or the universally-adored Earthquake, but it does make many otherwise lacklustre moves quite frightening: Razor Shell, for instance, which is at best a niche move for its original user Samurott, becomes a very powerful primary Water attack for Barbaracle that also has a good chance to weaken its target’s defence, making it much more difficult to stand up to a second hit (of course, when you’re in Barbaracle’s position, what you’re really hoping to do is one-shot things, and a physical Water attack that hits harder immediately would have been nice, but sadly Barbaracle doesn’t get one – c’est la vie).  Night Slash and Shadow Claw, normally almost too weak to consider, are elevated to quite respectable heights, but their main draw is providing very good neutral coverage, something Water attacks already do quite well anyway.  X-Scissor and Poison Jab become really nasty, and either can help to ward off many of the Grass-types that Barbaracle would otherwise fear; Cross Chop is a perfectly strong attack already and becomes just plain evil with the Tough Claws bonus, if you don’t mind its poor accuracy.  Really, you’re spoiled for choice with this thing.

  It almost seems like a crime even to consider doing anything else with a Pokémon that has Shell Smash, but on the other hand it’s sort of difficult to win at that game when you’re up against Cloyster, who has nonsense like Skill Linked Rock Blast and Icicle Spear, as well as a usable special attack stat.  Alternatively, Barbaracle can use Rock Polish to speed up and outrun things, Hone Claws to do more damage and achieve reliable accuracy with Stone Edge, Bulk Up to play more of a tankish role, or Swords Dance to pull the old slow physical bruiser act.  The advantage is that you can retain Barbaracle’s reasonably solid defences without having to use a White Herb and give up the possibility of a more powerful item.  This, to put it mildly, is not a huge selling point as there are other Pokémon who can do each of these things much better.  However, the options are there.  Finally, and I mention this more for the novelty than anything else, Tough Claws does increase the power of Clamp, if for some reason you feel like using Barbaracle to trap things (or, hell, go full gimmick and stick a Binding Band on it; go nuts).  Similarly, it almost seems like a crime not to use Tough Claws on this thing, but Barbaracle does in fact have other abilities, and if you’re using something like [Earthquake/Stone Edge/Razor Shell/Shell Smash], with only one move that benefits from Tough Claws anyway, you could consider instead Sniper, which improves critical hit damage.  Critical hits, in case you’ve missed this, do only x1.5 damage in X and Y (x2.25 with Sniper) rather than the former x2 (x3 with Sniper), but the chance of scoring one scales more quickly with bonuses like Focus Energy – some Pokémon can actually hit 100% critical hit rates, making crit-spamming possible if not exactly brilliant for them, although Barbaracle is not among these.  The base chance of scoring a critical hit is still only 1/16 (and still 1/8 for Stone Edge, Shadow Claw or Night Slash), so Sniper is actually a weaker ability under the new rules if you aren’t going to specialise, but it certainly can’t hurt.  The last ability is Pickpocket, which is really rather silly – it steals the item of any opponent that makes contact with Barbaracle, provided it isn’t already holding one – but I mention it anyway because Barbaracle is, surprisingly enough, probably the best Pokémon to use this ability; the others who get it are Shiftry and Weavile, who just aren’t accustomed to taking physical attacks in the same way that Barbaracle is.  That, and Barbaracle is literally made of hands, so Pickpocket is a nice flavour thing if nothing else.

  Sauropods followed a very straightforward evolutionary strategy: just get so big that nothing will ever dare to f#@& with you.  They may have been the largest animals ever to exist, though it’s hard to tell because the biggest ones are known only from two or three bones each (and what might have been the largest of all, a femur and vertebra designated Amphicoelias fragillimus, were mysteriously lost by their discoverer Edward Drinker Cope, the Worst Palaeontologist Ever, back in the 1870s, making their size impossible to verify).  Certainly they dwarfed all other known land animals.  Sauropods seem to have been browsers, processing vast quantities of leaves in their enormous stomachs to sustain their oversized bodies, though funnily enough they were actually more closely related to the predominantly carnivorous theropods than to any of the other well-known herbivorous groups like stegosaurs or ceratopids.  As well as the distinctive long neck, Aurorus has the tapering whip-like tail that characterises most of the larger sauropods; contrast the stumpy tails of Meganium and Tropius.  The ice crystals on her sides make me think specifically of Saltasaurus, one of the last members of the sauropod lineage, who lived in what is now South America.  Saltasaurus was much smaller than some of its relatives (although still pretty enormous!), but made up for it with a neat new armour plating adaptation, not as heavy as what its ankylosaur contemporaries had, but perhaps enough to deter the few predators who weren’t put off by its size alone.  The pair of sails on the neck is an interesting touch; as far as I’ve been able to find out, only one sauropod genus has been reconstructed with a sail – Amargasaurus, who also seems to be referenced by Aurorus’ Japanese, French and German names – and even that’s a touch speculative because, of course, the sail is made of soft tissue and doesn’t fossilise, so all we get is the bony spines that would have supported it.  The most popular guess at the purpose of this structure, and similar ones in unrelated dinosaurs like Spinosaurus, is that it had something to do with heat regulation, giving the animals a larger surface area to radiate excess heat in the relatively warm climate of the Cretaceous period.  That makes their presence on an Ice Pokémon who explicitly lived in cold places rather curious – maybe in Aurorus they served the reverse function, allowing her to drain heat more efficiently from her surroundings.

  Like most fossil Pokémon who are given dates, Amaura and Aurorus are assigned to the suspiciously round number “100 million years ago,” which would put them in the middle of the Cretaceous, although what exactly that means in the context of the Pokémon world is anyone’s guess.  They lived in very remote, inhospitable regions of the world, with no natural predators (or at least, none big enough to go after them), and as a result are extremely trusting, gentle creatures.  One can only speculate as to whether their eventual extinction had anything to do with that.  As Ice Pokémon, they are most at home in the cold and can create zones of frigid air; Aurorus also has the more unusual ability to throw up walls of ice that block incoming attacks.  Perhaps their most distinctive feature, however, has nothing to do with the cold at all: their connection with auroras, the spectacular glowing ribbons of light often visible in the sky at extreme northern and southern latitudes around the Earth’s magnetic poles, which represent high-energy ions captured by the Earth’s magnetic field returning to their ground states.  The phenomenon is referenced by the shifting colours of Amaura and Aurorus’ iridescent sails.  The games don’t seem to do much with this, beyond the vague association of auroras with cold parts of the world that also gives us the Ice-type attack Aurora Beam.  The anime, however, claims that Amaura and Aurorus’ voices can influence magnetic fields, allowing them to create localised auroras that serve as long-distance signals.  The neat thing about this is that it also gives Aurorus her most important non-Ice-type powers: she can learn several Electric attacks, which is a major selling point if you want to use her in a fight.  I actually wonder whether it would have made more sense for Aurorus to be Ice/Electric, which would have made it easier to emphasise the aurora themes in her design, but of course all fossil Pokémon have to be Rock-types because of Reasons, so let’s just leave it there.

  Being a fossil Pokémon, then, Aurorus has the type combination Rock/Ice, which is unique to her and Amaura.  Defensively, this is kind of painful; she has a lot of weaknesses and few useful resistances.  This is doubly unfortunate as she’s built as a tank, with a huge HP stat, good special attack and special defence, passable defence, and poor speed.  The fact that there are still no good Rock-type special attacks is another strike against Aurorus; if you want a Rock attack, you’re going to have to go with the rather weak Ancientpower.  Luckily though, her access to Thunderbolt as back-up for her Ice attacks means that type coverage is not a huge problem for Aurorus.  The list of Pokémon capable of resisting both halves of the traditional ‘bolt-beam’ combination has gradually expanded over the years, but is still a very short one: Magneton and Magnezone, Rotom’s washing machine and toaster forms, Lanturn with Volt Absorb, Mamoswine with Thick Fat, and Seaking with Lightningrod (and let’s be honest here, if your opponents decide to put Seaking on their teams just to counter Aurorus then they most likely have bigger problems).  Dark Pulse, Flash Cannon and Psychic are all available to fill out Aurorus’ moveset, and she can even use Calm Mind to build momentum, but her poor physical defence and inability to heal don’t do her any favours for that style, and defensive Ice-types have historically been uninspiring.  Maybe something with Rest, Sleep Talk and Charge Beam would be amusing.  Reflect might help her survive a bit longer if she can avoid Fighting and Steel attacks, and Thunder Wave is sure to ruin someone’s day; I think those are probably better choices than Calm Mind.  Alternatively, you can try to take advantage of her strong offensive movepool and reasonable power to Rock Polish your way to victory – she still won’t be very fast and her attack power will be stretched very thin, but she won’t be as slow as usual, and you might just surprise someone, especially as she’s not all that easy to take out with a single attack (again, barring Fighting and Steel moves).

  Aurorus’ little flirtation with uniqueness is the Refrigerate ability, which turns all of her Normal attacks into Ice attacks and increases their power by 30%.  She doesn’t have very many Normal-type special attacks to choose from, sadly; in fact she’s one of the few Pokémon for whom people are willing to consider Hyper Beam, something which I bring up mainly to advise against it.  The sheer power of a Refrigerated Hyper Beam is attractive mainly for its capacity to one-shot things that would otherwise have an extra turn to hit you, or that might stall with Leftovers, Recover, Protect, or similar; on the other hand, being disabled for a turn, unable even to switch out, puts not only Aurorus but potentially your entire team in jeopardy if your opponent decides to send in a set-up sweeper that Aurorus can’t immediately kill.  I won’t say you should never use it, especially since Aurorus isn’t exactly starved for type coverage, but Hyper Beam always looks better on paper than it performs in reality, put it that way.  A much better option is Tri-Attack.  If you take a look, you won't actually find Tri-Attack anywhere in Aurorus' movepool, but Nature Power will act as Tri-Attack most of the time in link and Wi-Fi battles (the exception is when either you or your opponent has decided to use one of the new terrain-altering moves, in which case Nature Power will end up being Thunderbolt, Energy Ball or Moonblast instead, but those aren't common) and be significantly stronger than Ice Beam (and they’re both TMs, so you can always swap in Ice Beam for wandering around the game world).  Ultimately, Aurorus winds up getting a 15% increase in power over a Pokémon who just uses Ice Beam.  It’s nothing to write home about, but it’s nice, and since her hidden ability hasn’t been released yet (and might never be, knowing Game Freak), you may as well take it.  The hidden ability, incidentally, is Snow Warning and will make her only the second Pokémon in the game with automatic Hail.  Hail was always the least useful weather type, and it possibly suffered the most from the now-limited durations of the automatic weather abilities, since the best Pokémon to take advantage of Hail are stall-oriented things like Walrein.  Still, it’s a rare ability and will also let Aurorus use 100% accurate Blizzards, so if it’s ever released, that’s probably the one you want to go with.