Trials of a Level 30 Magnezone

I’ve been engaging in a relatively fruitless quest over the past several weeks. I train most of my competitive Pokemon for level 30. It’s partly from the format I started with in competitive battling, but also a recognition of the difficulty of training a Pokemon within set limits.

The challenge? Magnezone. If you haven’t followed Magnezone before, it’s pretty awesome. Its Magnet Pull ability prevents Steel-types from escaping. It has excellent stats, focusing on Special Attacks. The drawback is that Magnemite evolves to Magneton at level 30. Magneton evolves into Magnezone in Mt. Coronet, during a level up – standard tricks, means that I have a level 31 Magnezone.

The answer? Find a wild Magneton, below level 30. Sometimes wild Pokemon will exist in forms that you can’t duplicate, such as a Magneton below level 30. You can find them in the wild in Platinum, but they’re all too high in level. Diamond & Pearl don’t have them showing up at all, only Magnemite. I dusted off my Ruby game – meaning I can find them in New Mauville (just south of Mauville City, then Surf east). Unfortunately they’re rare. As in, out of 150 Pokemon, I’ve seen 3. (“150” is a loose number. It could easily be higher. And that means hours of play, but something you can do while you watch a DVD or bust out on a bus.)

The primary drawback to using wild Pokemon as a base to build from is that you can’t breed a bunch of them, check their IVs, and use the best one. Finding one of even the right nature and ability is hard enough…waiting for amazing IVs seems like a lost cause.

But I want a Modest-natured Magneton. Modest gives its powerful Special Attack stat an even higher boost, at a cost of Attack. Sadly, I migrated most of my Pokemon up to Diamond back in the day, so I have very little ‘catching’ Pokemon in reserve. I really wanted a Modest Abra with Synchronize (if it leads the party, half the Magnetons I would run into are Modest), which meant a long exile into the caves by Dewford. Abra tries to teleport out, so you either have to put it Asleep, or throw money/balls at it. I decided that Hypnotize would be the fastest route, so I found a Spinda and was in business.

Except it wasn’t perfect. Hypnotize has a 70% accuracy and I kept having to catch a lot of Abra, and none of them were Modest AND Synchronize (Inner Focus is useful as an ability, but not for what I wanted the Abra for). I realized I went about it all wrong, and started catching Ralts instead. If the wild Ralts used its “Trace” ability on my Spinda, I knew I didn’t have to catch it…and it also doesn’t know Teleport for those times where Hypnotize would miss. Catching a Modest-natured Ralts was fast - I had one in 20 minutes.

So I have Ralts, have Spinda, and now spend all of my time in New Mauville. The three Magneton that I have caught so far aren’t Modest – I’d even settle for a Timid one at this point. But the upside has been that in one of the random battles, a Shiny Magnemite showed up…and the 50% paid off, so I’ll have a sparkly Modest Magnezone for my level 50 build!