#wyrdeer

His whole world~ 🌎✨

Been a while but with the addition of Spectrier and Glastrier I had to add another sheet to the carousel pokeponies! They're the horsiest horsies we've gotten in a while so I couldn't very well ignore them. xD Plus Wyrdeer, Garigiraf, Paldean Tauros and Calyrex fill out the set to match the old ones nicely. :)

So yes, here is all the updated art! Calyrex looks a little odd on his own here but he's intended to be a sticker that sits on the other horses heheh.

usually, when this happens in the wild without human intervention, it just means that the pressures to evolve were overwhelmed by pressures against evolution. but wyrdeer is kind of an interesting case! while they do have that luxurious fur, global warming is no the reason they stopped evolving.

wyrdeer were extremely rare in the wild even during hisuian times, because their evolutionary requirements are so specific. what caused their evolution was not living in a cold climate but rather exposure to a very specific type of psychic type energy caused by using the move psyshield bash in a specific way. the fur growth resulting in that warm beard is a side effect of the energy, which is something we see in other pokemon that store energy in their fur or feathers. only the strongest, most agile stantler were capable of triggering evolution in the wild, which is why wyrdeer generally were seen leading their herds.

as for why the evolution died out...part of it is because it just wasn't a common evolution. wild stantler can survive just fine without a wyrdeer leading them. the other part is that, as populations of stantler were brought to sinnoh from johto and began breeding with sinnohan populations, there was a shift in moves learned by the resulting offspring. move atrophy happens more commonly than you might think! over time, psyshield bash dropped from the native moveset. the resulting population therefore lost the means they needed to evolve, but because stantler survive super well on their own, it didn't really affect them.