half joking and half not joking I think they did this with both Stonjourner and Eiscue, with the former being more apparent
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they gave stonjourner excellent hp/atk/def but made sure its special defense was the worst special defense to ever special defense, and made it way faster than you would ever want for trick room. they gave it a 30% damage boost to your ally ability but designed its stats to make sure you would never actually use this pokemon without suffering in doubles.
also I hate stonjourner's design, honestly the only rock type I hate and rock is my favorite type. it feels like a corporate mascot of the actual stonehenge pokemon that we just never got to see. when I think of like ancient structures or paintings depicted as pokemon I think of greats like sigilyph or nosepass or golett/golurk. the face and paper mario floating block arms just do not do it for me.
I do like this tcg art tho
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I hate that SpD too. It WOULD'VE been a doubles mon, which I don't play, but it still bugs me. I maybe could tried it even without singles ability if all stats were done, but the SpD isn't enough even with av and evs.
Between those and the posts talking about Eiscue, I wonder if Eiscue and Stonejourner are the worst “Version Exclusive” counterparts possible after the really-early game bugs.
Eiscue has an interesting concept of “starts as slow and bulky, but can turn into a speedster”, but between the type and consequently incompatibilities, as well as suffering from a master of none stat distributions on both forms, it felt like it is doomed at the beginning despite a design that I’ve grown up to.
Stonjourner, on the other hand, symbolizes everything wrong about an archetypical Rock-type; high physical stats, atrocious special stats even by standards, an awkawrd speed tier and got nothing else to stand out on a casual playthrouh or even VGC. Had the SpD and Speed were swapped from the beginning, it’ll be an infinitely more interesting Rock-type in the context of VGC and a much more servicable one in casual playthroughs.
The two even symoblizes what went wrong with single-staged Pokémon in general; they either has an impractical gimmick, mediocre to bad stat spread, tend to be found far later than their BST suggests, a lopsided rivalry in term of viability and how they interact against each others, or worse, a combination of those. It makes a lack of evolution even more insulting, so insulting that maybe getting only a pre-evolution at the beginning may be slightly more insulting.
Like, I get they are meant to be “pre-promotion units” and all, but not many casual players agree with this game design, as many prefer to stick with their favorites, many of which that evolved at some point. Yes, you can win even the hardest Champion battles with those, but it’s more effective to do so with better Pokémon unless you want a serious challenge. (Or if you want to cheese foes with Prankster Encore Volbeat / Illumise, and that still worked well in difficulty ROM hacks and fangames even with more advanced opponent AI, lol)
The exceptions like Heracross, Lapras, Aerodactyl, Wishiwashi once Schooling’s activated, Pinsir with it’s Mega, Mawile + Sableye with their respective Megas (and the base forms are still popular in their own right), and other high-BST single stages are exception due to already coming ready with good enough stats to keep up even in the endgame. Those are small percentage compared to the single-staged underdogs, though.
