Mega Magcargo analysis. With its base form being pretty much outclassed by all offensive and defensive alternatives in PU, the Mega better bring something to the table that makes it worthwhile to use, let’s take a look. It loses 20 points in speed down to 10, making it the slowest mega in the game, and the slowest fully evolved pokemon barring Shuckle. It’s not a huge loss, as there aren’t any relevant taunters that wouldn’t outspeed it before anyway.
It gets just buffs aside from this, with Defense going up to a whopping 175 from 120, putting it nicely on spot #10 on highest defense stat. It’s special attack bumps up to 115 from 80, and its special defense bumps up to 110, giving it some solid defenses. It’s HP is still an abysmall 50, however, which means that this is not nearly as powerful as you’d initially think.
It retains its Fire/Rock combo, being an absolutely horrible defensive typing with 2 weaknesses, and 2 4x weaknesses. However, with its ability Castle Moat, one of those 4x weaknesses gets turned into an immunity that boosts its special defense when hit, awesome.
It’s offensive presense is very limited, having only Ancientpower as a second stab move Even though it is still weak to common attacking types, it has 7 resistences, one of which a 1/4x resistences, this is pretty decent, but gets downsized a bit because of its extremely common 4x weakness to ground, still.
Support Magcargo @Magcargonite Ability: Flame Body / Magma Armor EVs: 248 HP / 8 Def / 252 SpD Calm Nature
- Stealth Rock
- Lava Plume / Flamethrower
- Toxic / Ancientpower
- Recover
Basically the PU set. If you want extra burn chance, use Lava Plume, if not, use Flamethrower for extra power. It doesn’t really matter if you are running toxic anyway, so I’d personally go with Flamethrower. Though the Lava Plume burn can be useful, still, choose for yourself. Definetely use Lava Plume when you use Ancientpower, however. You can’t really run anything else as Magcargo doesn’t have the movepool for offensive sets. It has some alternative support moves
Stealth Rock is for setting up. You might wanna do this early on to get the most out of it, so I’d recommend sending this in against things that get forced out (most grass types like Serperior and Venusaur, Flying types like Skarmory and Talonflame, you get it). It works well against Azumarill when it doesn’t carry Superpower, but it’d confirm this before sending Magcargo in, cuz it will definetely hurt, and you can’t hurt it back too well.
You could run Modest if you truly wanted the additional power or anything that lowers speed. A speed loss doesn’t really matter for Magcargo, as it won’t ever outspeed anything. If anything it reduces the damage done by gyro ball.
This thing walls flying types almost perfectly. Talonflame hates it, Skarmory hates it. It can handle Ferrothorn easilly, it can handle Char-Y. There are a lot of offensive types it straight up shuts down, which is an amazing feat. However, it isn’t something alternatives can’t do that much better. It’s extremely slow, and will easilly be taunted. Not to mention that anything using Earthquake or Earthpower will absolutely ruin your day.
It’s a nice contender, at first glance, and only time will tell if it is able to hold up against other walls like Ttar and Heatran that have similar bulk because of their Hp stat. As for stealth rock setters, it’s pretty terrible when compared to alternatives like Mega Aggron that are much more bulky and can take it out in a fell swoop. I don’t really think you should use Mega Magcargo in OU, perhaps in UU, where strong Water Types take the frontside a bit more.
Any suggestions? Disagree, agree? Leave it down below.