Legendary and Mythical Pokémon: The Complete Overview

A Legendary Pokémon is not something you stumble on in a patch of tall grass: it waits at the end of a quest, one of a kind, and the game will not replay the scene if you blow it. These creatures number 94 out of 1,025 — 71 Legendary and 23 Mythical — barely 9% of the National Pokédex, and yet they carry the box art of nearly every game, half the movies and most of the series' mythology.

This page covers the question from every angle: what the four labels people mix up actually mean (Legendary, Mythical, Ultra Beast, Paradox), the pantheon of every region in the Pokémon world, what the status is worth in stats, how you catch these species without wasting your one chance, and the real-world mythologies they draw on. Every creature named links to its entry in the shop's Pokédex.

Legendary, Mythical, Ultra Beast: four labels people mix up

Four official labels share the top of the Pokédex, and they do not mean the same thing. A Legendary Pokémon (伝説のポケモン, Densetsu no Pokémon) is tied to a myth about the creation or the ordering of the world. A Mythical Pokémon (幻のポケモン, Maboroshi no Pokémon, "illusory Pokémon") is so rare that specialists ended up relegating it to the rank of a myth: it is related to the Legendaries, but forms a separate group. Ultra Beasts (ウルトラビースト, Ultra Beast) and Paradox Pokémon (パラドックスポケモン) are two more recent families, introduced in the seventh and the ninth generation respectively.

No mechanical criterion makes a Legendary: nothing in the games explicitly defines membership in the group, and the only way to identify one is through the official word, that of the games, the animated series or The Pokémon Company's websites. The list is set by authority, not the product of a rule.

A Japanese distinction the West picked up only late

In Japanese, the two groups have always been distinct: the Legendary was born with Pokémon Red and Green, the Mythical in the CoroCoro of May 1996 that announced the first Mew distribution. Outside Japan, the distinction only took hold in the fifth generation : before that, anything rare passed for Legendary, and the official vocabulary wavered until 2021, when the English site for Pokémon Legends: Arceus finally reclassified Arceus as Mythical. The section devoted to the Mythicals retraces this history of the word.

Ultra Beasts and Paradoxes: neighbors of the Legendaries, counted separately

The eleven Ultra Beasts come from Ultra Space and cross through Ultra Wormholes. They have never belonged to the Legendaries, but they did carry its mark in the code: the games internally classed them among the "Sub-Legendaries" up to Scarlet and Violet, which makes them a group of their own. Their signature is arithmetical: their base stats are prime numbers, with Naganadel's Speed the sole exception. The complete guide to the Ultra Beasts goes through them one by one.

Paldea's twenty-two Paradox Pokémon break down into eleven per version, the ancient ones exclusive to Scarlet, the future ones exclusive to Purple. Poképédia notes their kinship with the Ultra Beasts: the same place in the story, genderless species, each family paired with a Legendary from its region. Koraidon and Miraidon are the only two Paradoxes that are also Legendary. Each one has its own entry in the Paradox Pokémon feature.

The cases that blur the line

Two Mythicals pull at the line in opposite directions: Phione, the only one in its group that hatches from an Egg and that caps out at 480 points when its peers aim for 600, and Keldeo, fourth member of the Swords of Justice while Cobalion, Terrakion and Virizion are Legendary. The section devoted to the Mythicals details these two cases; the 600-point threshold, for its part, is also that of ordinary families, as shown by the feature on the 600 club.

Necrozma blurs the neighboring line: the game itself lets it pass for an Ultra Beast when it is Legendary, a misunderstanding that the section devoted to the Ultra Beasts takes apart further down. Conversely, Arcanine bears the Pokédex category "Legendary Pokémon" without being Legendary.

None of this shows up in game: the main-series Pokédex carries no "Legendary" label. The classification lies dormant in the internal data ofScarlet and Violet and Pokémon GO, typos included — the section devoted to the Mythicals gives the most telling one. The Alola Pokédex is the exception and colors its entries: a gold background for the Mythicals and the special Pokémon, green for the other Legendaries and the Ultra Beasts.

How many species does this pantheon really include?

This pantheon is spread across four official lists, each keeping its own count: 71 Legendary species, 23 Mythical, 11 Ultra Beasts and 22 Paradox Pokémon. The sum comes to 127, but the real total of distinct species is 125. Koraidon and Miraidon belong to both categories at once, Legendary and Paradox, and are therefore counted twice. No other overlap exists between the four lists.

Why 71 Legendaries and not 82

Poképédia's "Legendary Pokémon" category returns 82 entries, eleven more than the number of species. The gap comes down to forms: a regional form, a fusion or a transformation does not create an extra entry in the National Pokédex. That is the case for the three Galarian birds, the two Kyurem forms from the DNA Splicers, Gigantamax Urshifu and the two mounted forms of Calyrex obtained with the Reins of Unity — the steeds themselves, Glastrier and Spectrier, remain two full species of their own. The last three entries are states of Necrozma, including Ultra Necrozma: an Ultra Burst achieved with the Ultranecrozium Z, neither one more species, nor a twelfth Ultra Beast in the main games.

The boundaries the count does not explain

Two Mythicals resist this classification — Phione, which hatches from an Egg, and Keldeo, fourth Sword of Justice when the other three are Legendary —, but they change nothing about the count : the section devoted to the Mythicals details their case. The pantheon's large groupings are in fact defined by the story rather than by the category: the feature on legendary trios and duos goes through them one by one. These boundaries are observed more than they are explained: no explicit criterion defines a Legendary, only official statements settle the matter.

125 species out of 1,025

The denominator calls for the same caution. Poképédia's counter shows 1,028 species, but three of them are not playable yet : Broussatif, Caloulou and Ogéko, the tenth generation's starter Pokémon, revealed on February 27, 2026 for Pokémon Winds and Waves, due on Nintendo Switch 2 in 2027. The playable National Pokédex therefore holds 1,025 species: the 125 in this pantheon account for 12.2% of it, the Legendaries alone for 6.9%.

The two most recent families are counted separately, and none of them is Legendary, Koraidon and Miraidon aside : eleven Ultra Beasts, twenty-two Paradoxes at eleven per version. Two features cover them species by species: the eleven Ultra Beasts to the twenty-two Paradox Pokémon.

None of these figures is displayed by the game, and none of them is final: the count is a list set by authority, kept up to date as announcements come, not a mechanical rule.

Kanto sets the template: three Legendary birds, then the secret of Mew

The first generation has only five creatures out of the ordinary: four Legendaries and a single Mythical. Articuno, Zapdos and Moltres open the series at #144 to 146, Mewtwo follows at #150, and Mew, the Mythical, closes the Kanto Pokédex at #151. The four Legendaries set up the grammar the series has never left behind: a fixed location, a one-of-a-kind encounter, a level far above the rest of the game, a catch rate at rock bottom. Mew, for its part, fits into none of these boxes.

Three birds, three locations, the same level 50

The trio is calibrated identically. In Pokémon Red Version, Blue Version to Yellow Version, each one waits at level 50, one of a kind, with no respawn, with the same stats: 580 in total, 90 HP and a Special of 125. It is one and the same creature permuted three times, over ice, lightning and fire. The Legendary trios of the following generations reuse this mold, which the feature on legendary trios and duos details group by group.

The three locations, for their part, are not equal. Articuno sleeps on the fourth basement floor of the Seafoam Islands, behind the only environmental puzzle that guards a Kanto Legendary : boulders to push from one floor down to the next in order to divert currents you cannot swim back up. Zapdos occupies the Power Plant, on Route 10: it is the Kanto Legendary you can reach with the fewest Badges, just two, the Boulder Badge and the Soul Badge. Moltres guards Victory Road; it is the only one of the three that later games relocated, to Mt. Ember and then to Mt. Silver Cave.

Their French names owe nothing to English: Artikodin, Électhor and Sulfura point to Odin, Thor and Ra, a translator's choice that the section devoted to the real-world mythologies comes back to further down. That approach does not stop at Kanto: the feature on regional legends and mythologies follows it from region to region.

Mewtwo, the first post-credits content

Mewtwo waits at level 70 in the basement of the Unknown Dungeon, which only opens once the player has become League Champion. Twenty levels above the birds, it is the highest-level encounter in the game, and it comes into battle with Swift, Psychic, Barrier and Recover: it doubles its Defense, then heals itself while your Poké Balls run out.

On top of that, the Psychic type was broken in Generation I : immune to Ghost moves through an unintentional bug, with no Dark or Steel types to face it. With 154 Special and 680 total, Mewtwo had virtually no counter. That left catching it: a rate of 3 out of 255, and a single Master Ball per playthrough for four targets. The feature on Poké Balls breaks down that math.

Mew's secret

Four lab journals, in the Pokémon Mansion on Cinnabar Island, tell the story in the reverse order of the Pokédex: an unknown species discovered in the jungle on July 5, named Mew five days later, a baby born on February 6 and named Mewtwo, and researchers overwhelmed on September 1. The clone is No. 150, the original No. 151.

Mew was never meant to be there, though. Only 150 Pokémon were supposed to exist, its design was not overseen by Ken Sugimori, and programmer Shigeki Morimoto slipped it into the cartridge at the last minute, into the 300 bytes freed up by removing the debugging functions. Its existence was never meant to be revealed. It was, in 1996, by the magazine CoroCoro Comics, which raffled off twenty copies of it: the franchise's first event distribution, whose section on distributions retraces how it unfolded and what came after.

The rest belongs to urban legend: the Mew glitch, popularized in the early 2000s, and the truck beside the S.S. Anne, under which there is strictly nothing in Generation I. The contrast comes down to a single number: with a catch rate of 45, Mew is fifteen times easier to catch than Mewtwo, and yet it is the only one of the five that no game offers without going through an event.

Johto adds a trio revived by Ho-Oh and two guardians

Johto adds only six species to the pantheon, numbers 243 to 245 and 249 to 251 in the National Pokédex. The generation does, however, invent two constraints the series would go on to keep : the Legendary that flees battle and that one attack too many wipes from your save, and the Mythical locked behind an accessory that never left Japan.

The fire at the Burned Tower

Ecruteak City has two towers, built to encourage friendship between humans and Pokémon: the Burned Tower, where the Legendaries rest, and the Bell Tower, where they awaken, which the Game Boy games call the Tin Tower. The first was built 700 years ago and destroyed 150 years ago, when it still went by the name Brass Tower. The feature devoted to Johto walks through the city and its two towers.

The cause is lightning, not arson, and the fire burns for three days. Lugia, which nested at the top, fails to put it out with its wings, then summons a torrential downpour. Three Pokémon die in the flames; Ho-Oh revives them and grants them immense powers. They would be named Raikou, Entei and Suicune, and their original species has never been revealed.

Frightened by this power over life and death, the people of Ecruteak City drove the three revived Pokémon out: that is the in-universe explanation for the legendary beasts' wandering, of which Ho-Oh remains the trio master.

The Roaming Pokémon, a mechanic born here

In Pokémon Gold and Silver, the three beasts are the series' first Roaming Pokémon. Awakened in the basement of the Burned Tower, they flee at once and reappear at level 40 in the tall grass of the numbered routes, never in a cave; they switch routes every time you change area, and their Pokédex entry doubles as a tracker.

A roamer flees on the very first turn, and both damage and status conditions carry over from one encounter to the next: if it faints, it disappears from the save file for good. Mean Look blocks its escape; the Shadow Tag Ability does the same job from Generation III onward, since Generation II has no Abilities yet. The Fast Ball, on the other hand, is useless: a bug inGold, Silver to Crystal restricts its bonus to three unrelated species. The guide to Poké Balls goes through each type and its actual effect.

Crystallizing Pokémon breaks its own rule for its mascot: Suicune is no longer a roamer there and can be battled in the Tin Tower, once you have the Clear Bell. The three still keep the same 580-point total, simply redistributed from one to the next, and the same Ability, Pressure.

Two guardians, one per version

Ho-Oh and Lugia form a duo, the Tower Duo, distinct from Kanto's legendary birds. It is the only duo made up of two trio masters : Lugia commands the birds of Kanto, Ho-Oh the beasts of Johto. Their 680 points mirror each other, right down to the same Special Defense of 154.

The Rainbow Wing makes Ho-Oh appear at the top of the Bell Tower, the Silver Wing brings Lugia up from the depths of the Whirl Islands; the feather for the mascot of the game you are playing comes from the director of the Goldenrod Radio Tower, the other from an old man in Pewter City. In Gold to Silver, the mascot is met at level 40, the other at level 70 : the version decides which one you can catch early, a principle laid out in the feature on version-exclusive Pokémon.

Celebi closes the Pokédex

The sixth species is a Mythical, not a Legendary: Celebi, No. 251, Psychic and Grass type, with 100 points in each of its six stats. It appears at the shrine in Ilex Forest, after a GS Ball received in Goldenrod City and left with Kurt for a day.

The block outside Japan was a hardware matter: the event ran through the Mobile System GB, an accessory never sold anywhere else, and Goldenrod City's communication center was removed from the Western versions. The re-release of Crystal on the 3DS Virtual Console, in 2018, lifted the block: a nurse there hands over the GS Ball after the League.

Hoenn makes its regional pantheon the engine of its story

Hoenn brings to the Pokédex eight Legendaries and two Mythicals, but its contribution lies less in the number than in the place the story gives them. Awakening a Legendary is no longer a post-League bonus: it is the stated goal of Team Magma and Team Aqua, in a region split in two between land and ocean, one covered end to end by the complete guide to Hoenn.

The super-ancient Pokémon, a pantheon of the elements

The term used in-game is super-ancient Pokémon ; "weather trio" belongs to fan vocabulary. The three of them share three of the planet's envelopes, the hydrosphere, the lithosphere and the atmosphere, modeled on Leviathan, Behemoth and Ziz.

Groudon, the Continent Pokémon, weighs 950 kg and forces Drought the moment it enters battle. Kyogre answers with Drizzle, and with stats that are the exact mirror of its own: one's Attack is the other's Special Attack, for an identical total of 670.

Rayquaza towers over them at 680, lives in the ozone layer and only comes down to rest on the Sky Pillar. Its Air Lock Ability cancels every weather effect: its battle rules make it the arbiter of the other two.

A story that hangs on a stolen orb

The whole plot turns on an inventory detail: the villain walks off with the rival team's orb. In Ruby, Maxie, leader of Team Magma, steals the Blue Orb at Mt. Pyre while the player receives the Red Orb; in Sapphire, Archie, leader of Team Aqua, takes the Red Orb. Maxie therefore only manages to awaken Groudon, never to control it.

The awakening happens deep in the Seafloor Cavern, reached by Dive from Route 128, and the battle then takes place in the Cave of Origin, north of Sootopolis City, a town born in a meteorite crater. Emerald adds a third act: the two titans clash above the city and you have to climb the Sky Pillar, a ruined tower whose floors give way underfoot, to go get Rayquaza.

Primal Reversion, eleven years later

Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, in 2014, finally give the three super-ancient Pokémon a signature move — Precipice Blades, Origin Pulse and Dragon Ascent — and Primal Reversion: with the Red Orb or the Blue Orb, the base stat total climbs by 100 points without touching HP, for 770 each.

This transformation does not depend on the Trainer, unlike Mega Evolution: it triggers on its own as the Pokémon enters battle, so thata single team can combine one Mega Evolution and both Primal Reversions. Desolate Land then cancels every Water move, Primordial Sea every Fire move, and Delta Stream, Mega Rayquaza's Ability, sweeps both weather conditions away. Mega Rayquaza is also the only Pokémon that Mega Evolves without a Mega Stone, since all it needs is to know Dragon Ascent; the feature on Mega Evolutions comes back to this exception.

The titans, the Latias-Latios duo and the two Mythicals

The legendary titans — Regirock, Regice and Registeel — embody three ages, stone, ice and iron, and are only freed once you decipher the braille walls in the Sealed Chamber, under Route 134. The final puzzle requires Relicanth at the head of your party and Wailord at the back, with the order reversed in Emerald. The pairing is no accident: Relicanth is modeled on the coelacanth, a relative of the marine ancestors of land vertebrates, and Wailord on cetaceans, whose ancestors left dry land for the ocean. Two opposite journeys between land and sea, which is the very motif of Groudon and Kyogre.

Latias and Latios move the symmetry elsewhere: two single-gender species, one exclusively female, the other exclusively male, each the counterpart of the other. Their names come from the Latin "latere", to hide, with the first-declension suffix for Latias and the second-declension one for Latios. The feature on trios and duos unpacks these symmetries.

Jirachi hibernates for a thousand years and wakes for only seven days, an echo of Tanabata, the Japanese festival of wishes celebrated on the seventh day of the seventh month, whose strips of paper its wish tags reproduce. It is the only Generation III Pokémon that no Hoenn game lets you obtain without an event : in Europe, it came through Pokémon Channel.

Deoxys is the first Pokémon able to change form, but in Generation III the form was dictated by the game : Attack in FireRed, Defense in LeafGreen, Speed in Emerald, with no way to change it. At the end of the Delta Episode, a pyramid-shaped capsule emerges from the debris of the shattered asteroid and releases it: it becomes the first Mythical Pokémon you can catch during normal play, with no distributed item and no external connection.

Sinnoh entrusts time, space, and the antiworld to its Legendary Pokémon

Sinnoh's founding myth is written into the game, not pieced together by players. At the Canalave City library, Diamond and Pearl let you read "The Original Story": an Egg appeared out of a swirl of chaos, the Original One split off from it into two beings that set time in motion and expanded space, then into three more charged with giving birth to the spirit. The fourth generation's pantheon is therefore not a collection of rare creatures but an ordered cosmogony, where every Legendary Pokémon fills a stated role. The geography follows suit, from Mount Coronet to the three lakes, as detailed in the complete guide to Sinnoh.

Arceus plays the part of that Original One, and it is classed as a Mythical Pokémon, not a Legendary one. Its base stats are perfectly uniform: 120 in each one, for a total of 720. Its Multitype Ability matches its type to the Plate it holds, and its signature move Judgment changes type along with it; the Plates, sixteen in Diamond and Pearl and nineteen today, deliver the myth through their inscriptions.

Time, space, and the antiworld

The official name of the group formed by Dialga, Palkia, and Giratina is "Pokémon of Myth". All three share Dragon as their secondary type and a base stat total of 680, and their primary type spells out the three states of matter : Steel for the solid, Water for the liquid, Ghost for the gaseous and the ethereal. Each one keeps an exclusive move: Roar of Time, Spacial Rend, Shadow Force.

Giratina has a world of its own. The Distortion World, whose Japanese name literally means "Torn World", freezes time and destabilizes space. The battle that plays out there is coded separately : the sprite slides in from the top edge of the screen and the encounter message drops the word "wild". Giratina takes its Origin Forme there, which swaps the Pressure Ability for Levitate, the Altered Forme staying the one it wears in the material world.

Three lakes, three virtues, one Red Chain

The Lake Guardians embody the three beings devoted to the spirit, and the way they are paired up is counterintuitive. Mesprit, the Emotion Pokémon, does not watch over Lake Acuity but over Lake Verity; Uxie holds knowledge, Azelf willpower. All three come from the same Egg and post 580 base stat points apiece. Cyrus, the boss of Team Galactic, has the Red Chain forged from the crystals drawn out of these guardians: it holds Dialga and Palkia without a Poké Ball, so as not to cut down their power. Sinnoh did not invent the Legendary trio formula — the birds, the beasts, and the golems came first; the feature on Legendary trios and duos goes through each of these groups.

The region's loners

You meet the rest of the pantheon one at a time, each one gated behind its own condition. Heatran, the only Fire/Steel-type Pokémon in the franchise, sleeps at Stark Mountain until the Magma Stone wakes it. Regigigas demands the three Legendary golems in your party at Snowpoint Temple, but in Platinum you first need the event-distributed Regigigas for their caves to open. Cresselia, a female-only species, drops a Lunar Wing that frees a child from his nightmare.

Darkrai lives on Newmoon Island, not to be confused with Kanto's New Island: the species is not inherently evil, Diamond crediting it with the power to bring dreams while Pearl pins the nightmares on it. Manaphy is the only Mythical Pokémon able to produce Eggs, but the one it leaves at the Day Care holds a Phione, which will never evolve into Manaphy. Shaymin shifts from Land Forme to Sky Forme with the Gracidea, in the daytime only.

What Hisui adds to the myth

Pokémon Legends: Arceus, released on January 28, 2022, traces the story back to its source: Arceus becomes the first Mythical Pokémon to serve as the cover mascot of a main series game. Dialga and Palkia gain Origin Formes there, obtained with the Adamant Crystal and the Lustrous Globe, items distinct from the fourth generation's orbs. The people of Hisui split into two clans over a single theological question: time for the Diamond Clan, space for the Pearl Clan. The feature on Hisui walks through that storyline and its Noble Pokémon, which are not Legendary Pokémon.

Unova: truth, ideals, and a Legendary dragon cut in two

Unova breaks with the pattern of the earlier generations. Kanto had its three birds, Johto its three beasts, Sinnoh its deities of time and space: those groups existed in the plural from the very start, alongside the loners every generation also counted, from Mewtwo to Heatran, Cresselia, or Darkrai. The fifth generation starts from a single dragon, cut in two by a philosophical disagreement. The region is described in the feature devoted to Unova.

Poképédia files Reshiram, Zekrom, and Kyurem under the name Legendary dragons ; player communities talk about the Tao trio. The first two were once a single dragon, which two twin brothers used to create the region: the elder sought truth, the younger ideals, and the dragon split in order to follow each of them. Neither one could defeat the other; it was the sons of the two reconciled brothers who took the war back up, with no winner. The feature on regional legends and mythologies sets these stories side by side.

Truth against ideals, and the void in between

The split is philosophical before it is a matter of typing. Reshiram holds the yang, Dragon and Fire, category "Vast White"; Zekrom holds the yin, Dragon and Electric, category "Deep Black". Their base stats mirror each other exactly: 680 for both, 150 in Special Attack for the former, 150 in Attack for the latter.

Kyurem is the third term, neither yin nor yang but the wuji, the absence of both; Drayden, the Opelucid City Gym Leader, describes it in Black 2 and White 2 as a "cast-off shell", an incomplete being. Absofusion, performed with the DNA Splicers, makes it absorb the power of one of the two dragons: Black Kyurem or White Kyurem, at a 700 total against 660 in its ordinary form. Only one DNA Splicers can be obtained legitimately per cartridge, so the two forms never coexist.

The mechanics follow the lore to the letter: the cover dragon has to be caught for the story to move forward. If it faints or flees during the encounter, it stays at N's Castle until you catch it, and beating it awards no experience points.

The Forces of Nature, and the fourth arrival

"Genie trio" is a fan nickname: the official name of the group is the Forces of Nature. Landorus rules the land, Tornadus the skies, Thundurus the lightning, the domain of transition between the two. The number of horns tells them apart: one for Thundurus, two for Tornadus, three for Landorus, four for Enamorus.

Enamorus is not an Unova Pokémon, though: National Dex number 0905, she belongs to the eighth generation and arrives with Pokémon Legends: Arceus, the only female in a group that had been all male until then. The Incarnate and Therian Formes, for their part, date back to Black 2 and White 2 and are swapped with the Reveal Glass.

The Swords of Justice and the four Mythical Pokémon

The Swords of Justice are modeled on The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, a lineage confirmed by Ken Sugimori and unpacked further on with the other mythological sources. They all have Fighting as their secondary type, share the Justified Ability and the move Sacred Sword, and post the same 580 total with the same values simply shuffled around.

Keldeo is a Mythical Pokémon and not a Legendary one, and the only one of the four with a move that belongs to it alone: Secret Sword, whose damage is calculated from the user's Special Attack. Learning it at Pledge Grove, with the other three alongside, gives it its Resolute Form and three feathers, one blue, one orange, and one green, standing for Cobalion, Terrakion, and Virizion.

Victini carries No. 000 in both Unova Pokédexes, the only Pokémon to hold that slot in any Pokédex. It is also at the center of the fourteenth movie, the only one in the saga to exist in two versions, one with Reshiram, the other with Zekrom: the feature devoted to that two-version film covers it.

Meloetta changes type along with its form: Normal and Psychic in Aria Forme, Normal and Fighting in Pirouette Forme. The switch happens with every use of Relic Song, a move no TM teaches: you can only get it from a move tutor, set up in a Castelia City café in the fifth generation.

Genesect closes out the generation: revived from a fossil and then fitted with a cannon by Dudley, a scientist who refused to accept the shutdown of the project ordered by N, it is the only Pokémon whose Pokédex entry names an organization, Team Plasma.

Kalos: life, death, and balance in three mythical creatures

Xerneas (No. 0716, pure Fairy type) and Yveltal (No. 0717, Dark/Flying) are the respective mascots of Pokémon X to Pokémon Y ; Zygarde (No. 0718, Dragon/Ground) completes the trio. The symmetry between the two mascots is measurable: they share exactly the same base stats, 126 HP and 131 in both Attack and Special Attack, for an identical total of 680. Xerneas and Yveltal were also revealed on the same day, January 8, 2013, and both carry a catch rate of 45, very generous for story Legendary Pokémon.

The trio's framework is Norse. Each of the three takes up an animal from Yggdrasil, the cosmic tree: Yveltal the eagle Hræsvelg perched in the branches, Xerneas the stag Eikthyrnir that browses the boughs, Zygarde the serpent Nídhögg that gnaws at a root. Xerneas also owes its name to Cernunnos, the Gaulish stag god, and Yveltal to yvel, "evil" in Middle English. The "life trio" label that circulates among players has no official standing.

Life, death, balance

Xerneas is the first pure Fairy-type Legendary Pokémon. It shifts from Neutral Mode to Active Mode as soon as it is sent into battle, but this change is purely cosmetic and triggers no message. Geomancy requires a charging turn before granting two stages of Special Attack, Special Defense and Speed: it is the only signature move of a mascot Pokémon that is a status move.

Yveltal flips the mechanic. Oblivion Wing gives the user back 75% of the damage it deals, which fits its biology: when it runs low on energy, it petrifies living beings, then hibernates in a cocoon formed by its wings and its tail, immortal and still able to defend itself in that form.

Zygarde isn't built like the other two: it's a composite organism. Its Cells "have no consciousness" and make up the body, its Cores "serve as its brain" and sometimes act on their own. It exists in three forms, 486 base stat points in 10% Forme, 600 in 50% Forme and 708 in Complete Forme — with Complete Forme staying shorter than 50% Forme, but twice as heavy. Pokémon Sun and Moon turn this into a gathering quest: 100 organisms scattered across Alola, 95 Cells and 5 Cores, each Core unlocking a move.

Why Kalos pits life against death

The ultimate weapon was first designed to bring Pokémon back to life : its light revived AZ's Floette and made its master immortal, before serving as a weapon in the war 3,000 years ago. Reactivating it demands Xerneas's energy in the X version, Yveltal's in the Y version: the opposition between the two mascots is written into the story, not just into their Pokédex entries. A specialist in Legendary Pokémon, in Anistar City, goes further: the legends of the two creatures were supposedly invented to hide how dark the truth was and to name a scapegoat. The region and the war are unpacked in the feature devoted to Kalos.

Three Mythical Pokémon round out the generation: Diancie, Hoopa and Volcanion. None of them was catchable in-game in the sixth generation — their only location line reads "Event" — and they circulated through distributions alone. Volcanion remains the only Fire/Water-type Pokémon in the whole series. Mega Evolution, born in those same games, reaches the Legendary Pokémon too: Mega Mewtwo X and Y come from them, Mega Diancie and Mega Zygarde arrived later, and the phenomenon is covered in full in the Mega Evolution feature.

Alola: cosmic legends, island guardians and stolen light

The seventh generation opens on November 23, 2016 in Europe with Sun Pokémon to Moonlight Pokémon, followed a year later by Pokémon Ultra Sun to Ultra Moon, which replay the same region through an alternate story. It brings eleven Legendary and five Mythical Pokémon, the first eleven falling into three families: the Synthetic Pokémon, the cosmic Pokémon and the guardian deities. Only the last group follows the geography of the region, four islands crossed by an island challenge of seven trials, described in the guide to the Alola region.

Cosmog, Solgaleo and Lunala: the first Legendary Pokémon that evolve

Alola introduces a first: Cosmog, Cosmoem and Type: Null are the first Legendary Pokémon able to evolve. Cosmog is also the weakest of the Legendary Pokémon, with 200 base stat points and only two moves, Teleport and Splash, neither of them offensive: it and Cosmoem are the only two Pokémon unable to hurt an opponent other than through Struggle. It becomes Cosmoem at level 43, then Solgaleo or Lunala at level 53 depending on the version.

Cosmoem is 0.1 meters tall and weighs 999.9 kilograms, which gives it the highest mass-to-height ratio in the Pokédex, 9,999 kilograms per meter ; the dex nicknames it the "celestial cocoon." Solgaleo, Psychic/Steel, and Lunala, Psychic/Ghost, total 680 points each, the physical stats of one matching exactly the special stats of the other. You summon Solgaleo at the Altar of the Sunne, with a Cosmoem placed on it, by playing the Sun Flute and the Moon Flute at the same time during the day.

Necrozma, or the stolen light

Necrozma isn't just one more mascot. Worshipped in Ultra Megalopolis under the name "the Blinding One," it was wounded by the ancestors of the Ultra Recon Squad, who wanted to draw energy from it, and in the process lost part of its body and the power to create light. Ever since, it steals the light of the worlds it passes through and leaves them in darkness. That role makes it the first Pokémon to be the main antagonist of a core series game.

The N-Solarizer and the N-Lunarizer fuse it with Solgaleo or Lunala, into Dusk Mane Necrozma or Dawn Wings Necrozma, and Ultra Burst pushes either one all the way to Ultra Necrozma, a 7.5-meter Psychic/Dragon whose base stat total of 754 belongs to no other Pokémon.

The eleven Ultra Beasts, arriving from Ultra Space through the Ultra Wormholes, appear in the same games without counting among the Legendary Pokémon: the games place them in a category of their own. The people of Alola take Necrozma for one of them, but the Beast Ball, designed by the Aether Foundation to counter the Ultra Beasts, has no effect on it. Their code names, their off-the-charts stats and the way they arrive fill the feature devoted to the Ultra Beasts.

The four guardian deities

"Guardian deities of Alola" is the official name, taken from the website for Sun and Moon. Each island has its own: Tapu Koko on Melemele Island, Tapu Lele on Akala Island, Tapu Bulu on Ula'ula Island, Tapu Fini on Poni Island, all of them with Fairy as their secondary type. The four share a stat total of 570 and 70 HP, their five other stats being nothing but a permutation of the same values, and the move Nature’s Madness, which cuts away half of the target's remaining HP.

They choose the kahunas who govern each island and offer a Sparkling Stone to the Trainers who intrigue them. The Pokédex doesn't soften them: Tapu Lele is described there as an "innocent but terribly cruel Pokémon," and Tapu Village is said to be the remains of a village destroyed after its inhabitants provoked their anger. Tapu Koko closes out the main story of Sun and Moon : it's one of only two wild Pokémon to serve as the final battle of a game in the series.

Their models are Hawaiian, from the war god Kūkaʻilimoku, behind Tapu Koko, to the ocean god Kanaloa, behind Tapu Fini, and local legend credits them with driving back the Ultra Beasts. This transfer of a real pantheon into the game's bestiary is nothing unusual: other regions draw the same way on the folklore of their real-world model, as detailed in the feature on regional legends and mythologies.

Type: Null, Silvally and the five Mythical Pokémon

Type: Null is a laboratory creature: the Aether Foundation assembled it from cells of every known type, to have something to set against the Ultra Beasts. The three units produced became uncontrollable, were muzzled with a control mask and then put into cryogenic sleep, and Gladion freed one of them. Raised to maximum friendship, it becomes Silvally, whose RKS System Ability changes its type depending on which of the seventeen memory discs it holds.

The five Mythical Pokémon of the generation share neither a lineage nor a pantheon. Magearna is an automaton built five hundred years ago, whose mechanical body holds nothing but an artificial soul, the Soul-Heart; Marshadow slips into its opponent's shadow to copy its strength, to the point that the copy outdoes the original; Zeraora, the only Electric-type Mythical Pokémon, doesn't produce its own electricity and simply collects it from outside.

Meltan brings up the rear: it's the only Mythical Pokémon able to evolve, and its move up to Melmetal is only possible in Pokémon GO, in exchange for 400 Meltan Candy. It and Melmetal are, incidentally, missing from the Alola Pokédex, and the reason is worth more than the fact: they were born in Pokémon GO, not in the region's games. A regional Pokédex is never required to carry its whole generation — Sinnoh's leaves out twenty-six in Diamond and Pearl, including seven, from Heatran to Arceus, that Platinum doesn't add back.

Galar: the sword, the shield and a Legendary Pokémon from space

Pokémon Sword, Shield Pokémon and their two expansions line up eleven Legendary and Mythical Pokémon in a row in the National Pokédex, from No. 0888 to No. 0898, without a single ordinary species in between. Only three Pokémon are exempt from Dynamax : Zacian, Zamazenta and Eternatus, that is, the source of the phenomenon and the two species that defeated it; the giant mechanic has its own Dynamax and Gigantamax feature.

Zacian, Zamazenta and Galar's truncated legend

Zacian leaves its Hero of Many Battles form the moment it holds the Rusted Sword: it becomes Crowned Sword, gains the Steel type and sees Iron Head turn into Behemoth Blade, which deals double damage to a Dynamaxed Pokémon. Zamazenta follows the same rule with the Rusted Shield and reaches 785 kilograms, a weight record for the Fighting type. Their Abilities answer each other point for point: Intrepid Sword for Attack, Dauntless Shield for Defense.

The Galarian legend told of only one human hero. The tapestries in Hammerlocke show two of them, however, and the statues in Stow-on-Side reveal that the sword and the shield of the story are the Pokémon of the two heroes : over time, the weapons and their bearers ended up as one in the myth. The Arthurian reading follows the same thread, from Excalibur to the shield Pridwen.

Each relic is exclusive to its version: the Rusted Sword is only found in Pokémon Sword, the Rusted Shield only in Shield Pokémon, and the other can only be obtained by trading. The mascots follow the same split, a general rule laid out in the version exclusives feature.

Eternatus, a Legendary Pokémon that arrived in a meteorite

Eternatus fell from the sky long before the cataclysm attributed to it: its meteorite crashed 20,000 years ago, while the Darkest Day only goes back 3,000 years. Dynamax emanates from its body, born of the particles released after its defeat at the hands of the two mascots. Chairman Rose deliberately woke it in the reactor of the Hammerlocke stadium, to get ahead of an energy shortage expected within a thousand years.

It's the tallest Pokémon ever recorded: twenty meters tall and 950 kilograms. Its Eternamax form, scripted and never playable, reaches a hundred meters and 1,125 base stat points, the only case in the series above a thousand. Its catch rate is set at 255, the top of the scale and the same value as a Pidgey: an ordinary Poké Ball is enough, and the capture, being scripted, cannot fail once Eternamax has been defeated — the game even slips a Poké Ball into the Bag of a player who has run out. It's the first Legendary Pokémon you are guaranteed to catch, while the most accessible of the others top out at a catch rate of 45.

Isle of Armor and Crown Tundra: a generation of permanent choices

The two parts of the Expansion Pass, The Isle of Armor on June 17, 2020, then The Crown Tundra on October 23, brought in most of the generation's Legendary Pokémon and one shared rule: you never get to go back on your choice. Kubfu is handed over at level 10 at the Master Dojo, and the tower it climbs permanently locks in Urshifu's adult form, Single Strike Style or Rapid Strike Style.

At the Crown Tundra's Split-Decision Ruins, the door only opens with Regirock, Regice, and Registeel in your party, and you then trace on the ground the symbol of the Legendary Pokémon you are waking. Regieleki and Regidrago can never both be caught in the same save file. Their 580 points are the same, though, distributed as mirror images of each other, and Regieleki concentrates 200 of them on Speed alone.

Calyrex closes this run of eleven at No. 0898, at 1.1 meters and 7.7 kilos: this lord of the harvest is a tiny Legendary Pokémon, forgotten after fertilizing a land then called Couroplaine. It only regains its power when hitched to one of its two steeds. Glastrier and Spectrier are two separate species that the Reins of Unity, one set per playthrough, bind to it for a 680 total.

Kanto's three Legendary birds come back in Galarian forms with completely rewritten types — Psychic/Flying, Fighting/Flying, and Dark/Flying — but keep the 580 points of their counterparts down to the last one. They do not roam in the same place : Galarian Articuno in the Crown Tundra, Galarian Zapdos in the Wild Area, Galarian Moltres on the Isle of Armor.

Zarude is the generation's only Mythical Pokémon. It has never been catchable in-game : this Dark/Grass monkey exists only through distributions, in France via a Micromania code in late 2020. Its signature move heals instead of attacking, and its role as an adoptive father is told in the feature devoted to the movie Secrets of the Jungle.

Paldea: divine mounts, Treasures of Ruin, and the Loyal Three

The ninth generation, opened by Pokémon Scarlet and Violet on November 18, 2022, has eleven Legendary Pokémon and a single Mythical Pokémon. All of these species sit in the last stretch of the National Pokédex: Wo-Chien holds number 1001, the first entry past the thousandth, and Pecharunt closes the list at 1025. In between come the three other Treasures of Ruin, the two mounts, the Loyal Three, Ogerpon, and Terapagos.

Koraidon and Miraidon, mounts that are Paradox Pokémon first

Both mascots carry the Pokédex category "Paradox Pokémon" and come from Area Zero. Koraidon, a Fighting/Dragon type, is said to be the past version of Cyclizar; Miraidon, an Electric/Dragon type, its future version. Their base stat totals are identical, at 670, but distributed in opposite directions: one leans into Attack, the other into Special Attack. Paradox Pokémon status and the twenty-two species it covers are handled in the guide to Paradox Pokémon.

It is the only Legendary duo with one member handed to you in the first few minutes, and the only one where you can catch two specimens in a single playthrough. The mount is diminished because it lost a battle : the scientist who brought it over with the time machine, Sada in Scarlet and Turo in Purple, restarted the experiment and imported a second, far more aggressive specimen; stepping between them during one of their clashes, the scientist took a fatal wound, and the first mount, left on its own, was defeated. Washed up on the beach at Inlet Grotto, it lost its abilities there and gets them back over the course of the Path of Legends storyline, fed on sandwiches made with Herba Mystica. It still cannot be used in battle before the end of the main story.

The Treasures of Ruin: four sealed grudges

Wo-Chien, Chien-Pao, Ting-Lu, and Chi-Yu share the Dark type, the "Ruinous Pokémon" category, and a 570 total. The founding tale says a collector king bought an urn, a sword, tablets, and magatama beads from a merchant: these treasures were Pokémon, and they soaked up the greed and the resentment of the court, turned into scourges, then were defeated and sealed in four shrines with sacred stakes. Each shrine opens by pulling out eight stakes of the same color, and that color tells you nothing about the type: the green stakes free Ting-Lu, a Ground type, and the blue ones Chi-Yu, a Fire type.

What makes them worth using in battle is their Abilities, permanently active across the whole field: Tablets of Ruin, Sword of Ruin, Vessel of Ruin, and Beads of Ruin each lower one stat of every other Pokémon on the field by 25%, their holder excepted. All four also learn Ruination, which takes away half of the target's remaining HP instead of dealing damage at a fixed power. Their model is Chinese: the Four Perils, which the section on real-world mythologies matches one by one to each of the four treasures. That mythological background is unpacked in regional legends and mythologies.

Terapagos, Ogerpon, and the Loyal Three

Terapagos is the being behind Terastallization. It rests in the Area Zero Underdepths, an underground gallery roughly a kilometer below the Zero Lab, and is said to be the source of the Terastal energy that saturates those walls. A Normal type, it carries eighteen polygonal plates on its shell, one per Tera type, and changes form twice: Terastal Form when it enters battle, Stellar Form when it Terastallizes, for totals of 450, 600, and 700. The mechanic itself is explained in the Terastal guide.

Ogerpon, a species that has only female individuals, was not born in Kitakami, the land that serves as the setting for The Teal Mask : she arrived there with a human companion, and both of them were rejected because of their faces. A craftsman moved by compassion made the masks so the two of them could fit in with the villagers, while the local legend, for its part, makes Ogerpon a monster. The Teal Mask leaves her pure Grass; the Wellspring Mask, the Hearthflame Mask, and the Cornerstone Mask add Water, Fire, and Rock respectively. Okidogi, Munkidori, and Fezandipiti, known together as the Loyal Three, are the thieves who stole three of them from her; Ogerpon killed them, and the frightened villagers came to see them as three heroes.

The last word goes to Pecharunt, the generation's only Mythical Pokémon and the last entry in the National Pokédex. It was the one enslaving the Loyal Three with Binding Mochi, which awaken their target's desires before handing that target over to its chains. Its shadow was already there, a fourth silhouette above Okidogi's, in the cutscene of the true legend of Kitakami.

Mythical Pokémon, or the art of never being findable

The Japanese name says what the English name hides: a Mythical Pokémon is a 幻のポケモン, Maboroshi no Pokémon, literally "Phantom Pokémon". Poképédia describes creatures so rare that experts in the Pokémon world came to doubt they existed at all and filed them away as myths. The classification is about access, not power.

Three traits keep coming back in the definition, and the first one governs the others: a Mythical Pokémon is not encountered in the normal course of the game and almost always comes through a distribution. The second follows from it: as a general rule, they are required neither for the National Pokédex nor for the Shiny Charm, so a player who missed the event is never stuck anywhere. The third is an observation more than a rule: most of them total 600 base stat points. On top of that comes a technical constraint, a ribbon that generally keeps them from being traded on the GTS.

A word that arrived long after the thing itself

Mew is the starting point of the group: the idea shows up in the May 1996 issue of the magazine CoroCoro, the one announcing its very first distribution. In Japanese, Mythical and Legendary Pokémon have always formed two separate sets. Outside Japan, before the fifth generation, everything was filed under "Legendary," and English used "Rare Pokémon," a phrase that appeared in Pokémon Snap to translate 幻のポケモン in reference to Mew.

On the French side, the word came out of the marketing before it came out of the games: The Pokémon Company used it on its websites as early as the fourth generation to describe distributed Pokémon, and the move tutor in Snowbelle City made it official in-game in X and Y with the phrase "those Pokémon we call Mythical." Before that, with no official term, French fans said "Pokémon Fées," fairy Pokémon, because of the small size and the mischievous streak of the first members. 2016 finished cementing the term, with eleven Mythical Pokémon distributed monthly for the franchise's twentieth anniversary.

The official vocabulary stayed unsettled long after that. The English site for Pokémon Legends: Arceus was still presenting Arceus as a Legendary Pokémon and only corrected the wording on September 28, 2021, while the Japanese site had been writing "Mythical" from the very beginning.

Twenty-three species, two of which don't quite fit

The group numbers 23 species, spread out very unevenly: five for the fourth generation and five for the seventh, four for the fifth, three for the sixth, and only one each for the eighth and the ninth. Two members resist the definition.

The first is Phione : it is the only one in the group born from an Egg, though that does not make it Manaphy's pre-evolution, since it never becomes one. Manaphy and Phione are also the only two exceptions to the rule that files every Legendary and Mythical Pokémon in the Undiscovered Egg Group. Its total caps at 480 where its peers aim for 600, and Pokémon Ranger: Guardian Signs openly treats it as an ordinary Pokémon.

Keldeo breaks the rule in the other direction: as the fourth member of the Swords of Justice, it carries the Mythical label while Cobalion, Terrakion, and Virizion are Legendary. A single lore group therefore ends up split across two official categories.

The same pattern recurs from one region to the next: the series builds its pantheons in groups of three, sometimes rounded out by a fourth member, from Kanto's birds to Johto's beasts, from Hoenn's giants to Alola's guardians. The feature devoted to legendary trios and duos goes through them all.

What the status reveals

600 remains the group's signature number, with an average of 606.96, while Legendary Pokémon cluster on 580 instead. Six Mythical Pokémon, from Mew to Victini, take the logic all the way by splitting that total evenly across their six stats, while Pecharunt spreads it differently, 88 across the board except for 160 in Defense. What these tiers are really worth, and why they rank no one, is measured further down in the section devoted to stats.

The classification itself never leaves the games' internal data. The data inScarlet and Violet harbors the most telling bug in the category : Shiinotic is flagged there as Mythical in place of Marshadow, most likely from a mix-up between their Japanese internal names, マシェード and マーシャドー.

Thirty years of distributions: how you actually got a Mythical

1996: twenty hand-made Mew

The franchise's first event distribution was launched by the May 1996 issue of CoroCoro Comics, released in April: a contest whose prize was Mew, for twenty winners. 78,000 people signed up ; a second drawing followed in July: 80,000 entrants for one hundred copies. Satoru Iwata credited that contest with the series' commercial takeoff.

Those twenty Mew were made by hand. Shigeki Morimoto, the programmer who had hidden the species in the game, generated them on his computer, then traded them one by one over the Game Link Cable onto the winners' cartridges. The scale followed: 100,000 Mew announced at Nintendo Space World '97 — an advertised ceiling, not a count.

The S.S. Anne truck, and the real feat

The truck does exist: parked on the dock of the S.S. Anne, in Vermilion City, it can only be reached with Surf, obtained after the ship has left. Rumor placed a Mew inside it. Moving it reveals nothing : the area holds nothing but that truck and, in FireRed/LeafGreen, a hidden Lava Cookie nearby.

The real way to get the species went by another name: the Trainer-Fly glitch, reported in the early 2000s. Getting spotted by a long-range Trainer, then escaping with Fly before the battle starts, leaves the game convinced a fight is underway; the species you then meet depends on the last opponent's Special stat — 21 for Mew.

Kiosks, cables and tickets

The Pokémon Center in New York, open from 2001 to 2005, housed four kiosks: one cartridge of Gold, Silver or Crystal, one random creature, once a week. That is where the very first Shiny event Pokémon were born, Ho-Oh and Lugia, in November 2002 — two Legendary Pokémon handed out, not Mythical ones. Outside of events, the alternate coloring follows precise rates, which the feature on Shiny Pokémon breaks down, hunting methods included.

The third generation invented game-to-game distribution over the GCN-GBA cable: in Europe, Jirachi could be picked up in Pokémon Channel. Celebi depended instead on an item that had appeared a generation earlier: the GS Ball, which made it show up once placed on the Ilex Forest shrine. The tickets, for their part, opened up entire islands.

Deoxys could only be met on Birth Island, unlocked by the AuroraTicket, distributed in France on September 24 and October 1 and 8, 2005. The MysticTicket, which led to Navel Rock, was never distributed outside Japan, the United States and Mexico.

From passwords to a distribution counter

Mystery Gift was born in the second generation looking nothing like a legendary counter: one random item a day, over infrared, between two Game Boy Colors. Two generations of passphrases then guarded the door — in Ruby and Sapphire, the player's profile had to read exactly "MYSTERY EVENT IS EXCITING." The feature has only been open from the start since the fifth generation.

The first Wi-Fi distribution outside Japan dates to March 10, 2010; Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection shut down on May 20, 2014. Two anti-cheat markers had already appeared back in 2007: the Cherish Ball, unobtainable any other way, and the Classic Ribbon, created to keep an event Pokémon from being deposited in the GTS. The other Poké Balls, and what each one changes about catching, are listed in the feature on Poké Balls.

2016: eleven Mythicals in eleven months

For the twentieth anniversary, one Mythical was distributed every month from February to December 2016: Mew, Celebi, Jirachi, Darkrai, Manaphy, Shaymin, Arceus, Victini, Keldeo, Genesect and Meloetta. There are eleven of them, not twelve : Volcanion, often added to the list, belonged to the nineteenth movie's promotion.

They all arrive at level 100, in a Cherish Ball. The month of distribution is written into their ID number : 02016 for Mew, 12016 for Meloetta. Four of them — Mew, Darkrai, Arceus and Genesect — came through a code picked up at Micromania; the other seven through a worldwide Wi-Fi connection.

Today: a code to type in, and a deadline

Since 2023, most of it happens at the keyboard: a code like GETY0URMEW in Scarlet and Violet, or the Mythical Pecha Berry, given out through Mystery Gift since January 2024. Pecharunt cannot be encountered anywhere in the wild, for that matter: with the berry in hand, you have to interact with the dusty knickknack at Peachy's, in Mossui Town, which starts the "Mochi Mayhem" epilogue, at the end of which you catch it, at level 88. Magearna, the only Mythical distributed by QR code, can still be obtained: that code does not expire.

Out of FireRed/LeafGreen, released on Switch on February 27, 2026, the AuroraTicket and the MysticTicket are handed over automatically after your first Hall of Fame entry. One deadline, though, closes the other end of the story: Pokémon Bank and Poké Transporter shut down on February 26, 2027. Event Pokémon from generations 5 through 7 still sitting on DS and 3DS will then have no bridge left to the current games.

Ultra Beasts are not Legendary Pokémon

Eleven species make up the Ultra Beast family, discovered in Alola: seven arrive with Pokémon Sun and Moon, four more with Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon. Not one of them sits in the Legendary Pokémon category: they have their own. The games' code has ruled on this twice — filed internally among the "sub-legendaries" until the ninth generation, they have formed their own group since Pokémon Scarlet and Violet.

A total of 570 and catch rates that do not line up

Nine of the eleven total 570 base stat points, Naganadel 540 and Poipole 420, while box mascots run to 680 or 720. Guzzlord, the hardest of the family to catch, stops at a catch rate of 15: the values 15 and 25 appear on no Legendary and no Mythical Pokémon, and no Ultra Beast reaches the 3 of the major legendaries.

One exclusive Ability ties them together: Beast Boost raises their highest stat by one stage each time they knock out a Pokémon. All eleven have it, none has a Hidden Ability, and no other Pokémon has ever received it — not Solgaleo, not Lunala, not Necrozma. All their base stats are prime numbers, except Naganadel's Speed, which is the square of a prime. Poipole is the only one in the group that evolves.

Ten per version, and no one-of-a-kind

Sun and Moon have you catch ten per version, over five police missions handed out by Anabel and Looker; Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon then make them available without limit in Ultra Space. Knocking out an Ultra Beast does not make it disappear, whereas a box legendary is lost for good in several games. Nihilego, the first of the family the player runs into, flees on the fifth turn at Aether Paradise.

The Beast Ball, not to be confused with the Ultra Ball, was designed by the Aether Foundation for these creatures: its bonus is 5 on an Ultra Beast and 0.1 on everything else. All the other Poké Balls, the Master Ball excepted, take that same penalty: they do a poor job of recognizing creatures from another dimension. The feature on Poké Balls breaks down these multipliers.

Necrozma and the false Ultra Beasts

The Aether Paradise archives assume that Cosmog, Cosmoem, Solgaleo and Lunala are among them, and the Pokédex in Sun Pokémon says as much about Necrozma. The Beast Ball works on none of them, because the game does not count them as such. Necrozma is classified as Legendary, with a catch rate of 3; only three of its forms carry the Ultra Beast label in the trading card game, never its base form.

The weapon designed against them, on the other hand, really is Legendary: Type: Null came out of an Aether Foundation experiment meant to create a Pokémon capable of defeating the Ultra Beasts, and Silvally keeps its catch rate of 3. Alola's guardian deities, the four tapu, occupy the mirror-image position : the Ultra Beasts are what those guardians protect the region from, after fighting them and driving them back.

The confusion comes from the game itself: the GTS filter hides them along with the legendaries, and Peony calls them "legendaries" in The Crown Tundra. The official 2017 and 2018 championship rules, though, banned special and Mythical Pokémon without excluding the eleven. The feature on the eleven Ultra Beasts goes through each species and its world of origin; their design kinship with the Paradox Pokémon, another genderless family in which twelve members out of twenty-two also total 570, has its own feature.

Paradox Pokémon, a rarity of an entirely different kind

Paradox Pokémon form a family that appeared in the ninth generation, in Paldea: twenty-two species, eleven per version, the ones from the past exclusive to Pokémon Scarlet, the ones from the future to Pokémon Violet. They do not belong to the present day while still keeping ties to contemporary species, have neither an evolution nor a pre-evolution, and are genderless and unable to breed. All twenty-two share the same Pokédex category, "Paradox Pokémon."

Two legendaries out of twenty-two

The official French site settles it: it presents Koraidon as the Legendary Pokémon ofScarlet, grants the same word to its counterpart in Purple, and gives it to none of the twenty other species in the group. Poképédia likewise files exactly two entries out of twenty-two under the "Legendary Pokémon" category. Being a Paradox Pokémon and being Legendary are therefore not mutually exclusive : the two statuses overlap on the mascots, and only on them.

The numbers say the same thing. Koraidon and Miraidon top out at 670 stat points while the twenty other Paradox Pokémon stop at 570 or 590, and their catch rate is 3, versus 5 to 50 for the rest of the group. That 3 is the value of Mewtwo, the legendary beasts and the Swords of Justice. The two mascots also carry an Ability no one else has, Orichalcum Pulse and Hadron Engine, where the twenty others share Protosynthesis for the past and Quark Drive for the future.

Regulation H in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet confirms the boundary: it bans both Paradox Pokémon and Legendary Pokémon, two categories named separately and banned together. A non-Legendary Paradox Pokémon is still an ordinary Pokémon as far as the classification goes, even when its whole biological profile says otherwise.

Legendary lookalikes that are not Legendaries

Six Legendary Pokémon have a Paradox lookalike: Suicune, Entei and Raikou on one side, Virizion, Terrakion and Cobalion on the other. The copy does not inherit its model's status. Raging Bolt, modeled on Raikou, is the largest of the twenty-two at 5.2 meters against 1.9 for its model, and that changes nothing about its rank. Both copied trios have their place in the feature on Legendary trios and duos.

The confusion comes from a shared profile: the "Undiscovered" Egg Group, sterility, a single form, and a base stat total of 570 for twelve of them. That is also the profile of the Ultra Beasts, which Poképédia ties to the Paradox Pokémon through seven parallels, among them their place in the story and their link to a mascot Legendary. The twin group is covered in the feature on the Ultra Beasts.

Their origin brings them no closer to the pantheon either: they were pulled from other eras by a time machine set up deep inside Area Zero, which runs on Terastal energy. The source of that energy, on the other hand, really is a Legendary : Terapagos. The twenty-two species, their models and their staggered arrival between 2022 and 2023 are detailed in the complete guide to Paradox Pokémon.

What Legendary status is worth in stats

A base stat has a very concrete meaning: at level 100, with no EVs or IVs and a neutral nature, a stat comes out to exactly 5 plus twice the base value, and HP to 110 plus twice the base value. Every base point gained is therefore worth two real points in battle. On default forms, the 94 Legendary and Mythical species post an average base stat total of 592, against 410.9 for the other species in the National Pokédex: a gap of 181 base points.

Two tiers carry half the group

The distribution is anything but continuous: the totals settle on a few sharp steps, and 580 and 600 alone account for 49 of the 94 species, a little more than half.

Each tier has its own logic. 580 is the tier of the Legendaries that arrive in groups — the birds, the beasts, the titans, the Lake Guardians, the Swords of Justice, the Forces of Nature except for Landorus, which stayed at 600. 600 is the historic tier of the Mythicals: Mew carries 100 in each of the six stats, and that template was reused as is by Celebi, Jirachi, Manaphy, Shaymin in Land Forme and Victini.

The often-quoted 570 threshold is not a floor: thirteen species fall below it. Cosmog brings up the rear with 200 points, the lowest total in the group. Several of these thirteen creatures are intermediate states that an evolution, a fusion or a form change pushes much higher.

The peaks, and what puts them in perspective

Arceus holds the record among default forms with 720 points, or 120 in each of the six stats, and its eighteen typed forms keep exactly that total. Across the whole Pokédex, base averages come to 68 in HP, 75 in Attack, 70 in Defense, 69 in Special Attack and 66 in Special Defense: it beats every one of them by more than forty points.

Above that, nothing is left but temporary or conditional states. Eternatus Eternamax peaks at 1 125, an all-time series record, but it is a battle form the player never gets to keep. The 700 tier is reached through a form change, an item or a fusion: Terapagos goes from 450 to 600 and then to 700 depending on its form, Kyurem climbs from 660 to 700 by fusing with Reshiram or Zekrom, and Zacian and Zamazenta cross the same threshold while holding the Rusted Sword or the Rusted Shield.

A big total guarantees nothing. Regigigas reaches 670, the level of Kyogre and Groudon, but its Slow Start Ability halves its Attack and its Speed for its first five full turns. Conversely, an average total can hide a record: Regieleki stays at 580 while pushing its base Speed to 200, the highest in the entire series.

The total is not enough to classify

570 is shared well beyond the pantheon. All the Ultra Beasts sit there except two, Poipole at 420 and Naganadel at 540, and most of the Paradox Pokémon do the same, with a handful of them climbing to 590. Neither group counts as Legendary, Koraidon and Miraidon aside. Eleven non-Legendary species even reach 600: the 600 club, from Dragonite to Baxcalibur, crosses that tier without ever receiving the status.

Two regularities come on top of the total, without ever amounting to proof of membership. Every Legendary follows the Slow experience curve, the one that demands 1,250,000 points to reach level 100 against 1,000,000 for the Medium Fast curve — but Magikarp, Dragonite and Lapras follow it too. And 68 of the 94 species give 3 effort points in a single stat — Mewtwo in Special Attack, Eternatus in HP, Regirock in Defense — a yield shared by the big ordinary evolutions, Dragonite and Tyranitar first among them.

Catching a Legendary without wasting your one shot

Catching a Legendary depends on only four parameters : the species' catch rate, the Ball used, remaining HP relative to maximum HP, and the status condition. Level, contrary to intuition, plays no part in the calculation. The health bonus climbs from 1 to nearly 3 when the target is on the brink of fainting; sleep and freeze are worth 2.5, paralysis, poison and burn 1.5.

Level does have a knock-on effect all the same, through HP. Regigigas makes the point: the one in Pokémon Platinum shows up at level 1, so a single remaining HP still amounts to 7.7% of its health, while the one in Diamond and Pearl drops below 1%. The first is therefore harder to catch.

The Ball shakes once for every successful roll among four numbers between 0 and 65,535: the three shakes are not an animation, they are three checks already passed.

The real rates and the Balls that matter

Most Legendaries and Mythicals have a catch rate of 3, the absolute floor. A few species escape that floor: Groudon, Kyogre and Ogerpon are at 5, the Treasures of Ruin at 6, Zacian and Zamazenta at 10, Phione, Dialga and Palkia at 30, and Mew, Celebi, Shaymin, Cosmog, Cosmoem, Xerneas, Yveltal, Solgaleo and Lunala at 45.

Rayquaza has had its rate changed twice: raised to 45 in Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire for its role in the Delta Episode, it was brought back down to 3 in Scarlet and Violet. At the opposite end, Eternatus posts 255, the game's maximum, because its capture is scripted and cannot fail.

Now a rate of 3 calls for a coefficient of 255, exactly the Ball bonus of the Master Ball and of nothing else: no ordinary combination reaches it. The Ultra Ball is worth 2 with no condition attached, the Quick Ball 5 on the first turn, the Timer Ball 4 from the eleventh turn on, the Dusk Ball 3 in caves or at night, and the Net Ball 3.5 against a Water or Bug type.

The Fast Ball, not to be confused with the Quick Ball, quadruples the bonus as soon as base Speed reaches 100. Regieleki and its 200 base Speed are its designated target. The breakdown Ball by Ball lives in the feature devoted to Poké Balls and how they work.

One trap is still worth clearing up: the Beast Ball is not the Ultra Ball. Reserved for Ultra Beasts, it badly penalizes any other capture, and the reverse holds too: against an Ultra Beast, every Ball collapses, the Master Ball excepted. The exact multipliers are given in the section devoted to that family.

Status conditions, False Swipe and soft resets

Between sleep and freeze, both at 2.5, sleep is the only workable one: Sing and Spore target the status condition directly, while freeze only comes as a secondary effect of offensive moves. In exchange, it only lasts 1 to 3 turns since the fifth generation.

False Swipe always leaves its target 1 HP, but its limit is rarely brought up: as a Normal-type move, it has no effect on a Ghost-type Legendary or Mythical. Giratina is completely immune to it, as are Spectrier, Marshadow and Hoopa.

That leaves the soft reset: save right before the battle, then go back to the title screen without saving the game, so the encounter can be replayed as many times as it takes. It changes neither the Ball nor the catch rate, but it rerolls the nature and the IVs on every attempt — the next section details its limits, starting with shiny locks and with the consoles that have no shortcut for it.

Second chances and false assumptions

Before Pokémon Platinum Version, a Legendary knocked out was lost for the rest of the save file, and fleeing the battle produced the same result; since then, most games bring it back once the Champion has been beaten. One exception holds in every game: if it is the player's team that falls, the Legendary never disappears. Black 2 and White 2 goes further and makes all of its Legendaries rechallengeable at will by taking on the League again.

One assumption is worth correcting: the Master Ball cannot be bought in any game, but it is not limited to one per save file — the ID Lottery has made it the jackpot ever since Gold and Silver. It is useless, on the other hand, in a Tera Raid, where catching a defeated Pokémon is guaranteed whatever the Ball.

The shiny lock: why so many Legendaries are locked

That same reset is the historic method for shiny hunting Legendaries, which the story usually offers only once. You still have to be able to trigger it: the button combinations change with the console — A + B + Start + Select on Game Boy, R + L + Select + Start on Nintendo DS, R + L + Start on Nintendo 3DS. The Nintendo Switch has none : you have to close the game from the console's home menu, then launch it again.

The "non-resettable" Pokémon

The shiny lock is written into the game's code: the species is programmed never to be encountered that way during a playthrough. No number of resets will make it appear. Still locked are Victini, Hoopa, Cosmog, Cosmoem, Magearna, Marshadow, Kubfu, Urshifu, Zarude, Glastrier, Spectrier, Calyrex, Ogerpon, Terapagos and Pecharunt, the Loyal Three — Fezandipiti, Okidogi and Munkidori — as well as six Paradox Pokémon, among them Walking Wake and Iron Crown.

The oldest of them is Victini, a Mythical Pokémon from Generation V, and it is not among the Shiny Pokémon distributed at events either : its alternate coloring sits unused in the game data.

The most recent is Pecharunt, the Mythical Pokémon that closes out Generation IX, obtained in the "Mochi Mayhem" epilogue. It comes after Terapagos, lurking at the bottom of the Area Zero Underdepths opened up by The Indigo Disk : each expansion added shiny locks of its own.

The lock survives second chances. In The Crown Tundra, Calyrex can be fought again by interacting with it once more, but repeating the battle brings you no closer to a Shiny form : that form does not exist in the game.

Another group stays locked in game even though its Shiny version really has circulated, through distributions only: Keldeo, Meloetta, Genesect, Diancie, Zeraora, Zacian, Zamazenta, Eternatus, Enamorus, Koraidon, Miraidon, the four Treasures of Ruin and the three Galarian birds. The Shiny exists, then, but you can never get it by playing.

The Treasures of Ruin even served as a showcase for that unobtainable coloring. Wo-Chien opened a run of event raids from July 23 to August 3, 2025, in which all four appeared as Shiny Pokémon without being catchable; the one-million-win target was reached in every wave, and a distribution followed.

On a locked species, soft resetting still has a use: Nature and IVs are rerolled at every encounter. So a story Legendary can be reset until you get the Nature you want, but its color will never change.

Where the lock does not apply

The Legendary Pokémon encountered at the end of the Max Lair, in the Crown Tundra, are not shiny locked. The odds are 1 in 300, or 1 in 100 with the Shiny Charm, and they are rolled separately for each of the four members of the party: the same Pokémon can be Shiny for one player and not for another, which only shows on the results screen. Turning it down lets you try again later. The gigantism phenomenon is covered in detail in the Dynamax and Gigantamax guide.

The actual rates and hunting methods are gathered in the guide devoted to Shiny Pokémon. The first thing to do is still to check whether the species you are after is shiny locked, otherwise hours of resets lead nowhere.

The real-world mythologies behind each regional pantheon

Comparisons between Legendary Pokémon and real-world mythologies have circulated since the series began, often with no ranking. Three levels of evidence separate them: what the developers have stated, what the official name literally contains, and what the encyclopedias suggest. The "Origin" sections on Bulbapedia say "may be based on": readings, not official statements.

What the developers have confirmed

Ken Sugimori explained in Nintendo Dream for April 2011 that the Swords of Justice take after Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers : Cobalion plays Athos, Terrakion plays Porthos and Virizion plays Aramis. It is the only Legendary group taken directly from a French novel.

Keldeo, left out of that quote, is given the role of d'Artagnan on Bulbapedia, the last to arrive and by far the youngest, plus a second model, the Scottish kelpie, a supernatural water horse: you meet it in the Crown Tundra, which is modeled on Scotland.

A month later, the same Sugimori recounted that Junichi Masuda had asked for Pokémon based on Fūjin and Raijin, the Japanese kami of wind and thunder: Tornadus and Thundurus. Landorus, designed as a god of the earth, was added late in development, at a point when the group was meant to stay a duo.

Giratina belongs to the same category: Masuda and Takeshi Kawachimaru stated in 2008 that the Pokémon and its Distortion World symbolize antimatter. Its Ghost type also stands for the gaseous state of matter, against Dialga's Steel and Palkia's Water.

A name you would assume is mythological can also owe nothing to mythology. Shigeru Ohmori explained in 2019 that Zacian comes from "the cyan" and Zamazenta from "the magenta": two colors, not Excalibur. The Arthurian cycle comes only from the commentators.

When the name is the evidence

The clearest case for a French reader is the three Kanto birds: their French names are mythological, their English names are not. Julien Bardakoff, the translator of the first generation, told Libération that he slipped a god into each one. Articuno combines "arctique" and "Odin" in its French name, Artikodin: the design of the bird reminded him of Odin's armor in Saint Seiya. The French Électhor carries Thor and Sulfura carries Ra, while Articuno, Zapdos and Moltres settle for the Spanish numerals uno, dos and tres.

Ho-Oh does not merely resemble the Chinese phoenix: it carries its name. Its Japanese name, Hōō, is the Japanese reading of 鳳凰, the word for the fenghuang itself. Sacred Ash and its Hidden Ability Regenerator carry the resurrection theme further.

Each of the four Tapu carries the Japanese prefix kapu, the Hawaiian word for "sacred, forbidden," related to the Polynesian tapu, which gave English the word "taboo". The case of Pecharunt is more direct still: its Japanese name, Momowarō, combines Momotarō with an adjective meaning "bad."

The connections the encyclopedias suggest

Most readings belong to this third level. Poképédia ties the Treasures of Ruin to the Four Perils of Chinese mythology, a quartet set against the four divine animals, the same Four Symbols that provide the framework for the Therian Formes of the Forces of Nature.

Groudon and Kyogre are read as Behemoth and Leviathan, which Hebrew tradition has killing each other at the end of time, with Rayquaza in the role of the Ziz: the markings on their limbs form an omega and an alpha, picked up by the titles Omega Ruby to Alpha Sapphire. The Lake Guardians, for their part, point to the Three Sacred Treasures of Japan.

These readings say nothing about the internal lore of the Pokémon world, which has legends of its own. The guide to regional legends and mythologies covers that layer, while the one on legendary trios and duos details the makeup of each group, and the four Ruins of Alola, from Conflict to the Beyond, are described in the guide to the Alola region.

Two species escape the exercise. Mewtwo and Mew have no mythological source : genetics, a vertebrate embryo and the science-fiction "little gray." Bardakoff says he asked whether "Mew" came from the English word for a cat's cry: the answer was no. The Pokémon pantheon is not a catalog of copied gods: name, design and localization there often come from different cultures.

On screen, these mythical creatures carry nearly every movie

The animated saga has twenty-three feature films, and all twenty-three feature at least one Legendary or Mythical Pokémon among their main Pokémon. The reason is structural: the movie serves as a showcase for the current generation, and its star usually comes straight from the games of the moment. Sometimes the order is reversed : the second movie came out in Japan on July 17, 1999, four months before Gold and Silver, and its star Lugia was created for it by screenwriter Takeshi Shudo, not for a cartridge. The French titles, though, do not always follow: fourteen of the twenty-three name the creature, while the other nine hide it behind a generic phrase, as in Pokémon: The Movie 2000 - The Power of One, whose star is Lugia.

Three movies in theaters, then DVD, television and VOD

Only movies 1, 2 and 3 had a theatrical run in France, on April 5, 2000, December 20, 2000 and June 13, 2001. The first movie drew 2,224,432 admissions, the second 740,089 moviegoers. From the fourth movie on, France switched to DVD, then to television and VOD, on a scrambled schedule: Pokémon Heroes came out on DVD on July 13, 2005, nearly two years before movies 4, 6 and 7, all three released on the same day, May 16, 2007.

Two movies blur that pattern. Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel, shown on French television in November 2016, was only screened in French theaters on November 22 and 23, 2025. Conversely, I Choose You! had its world premiere in France, on July 6, 2017 on the Yuzu stage at Japan Expo, nine days before its Japanese release.

What the movies allow themselves and the games do not

Several Legendary Pokémon seen on screen are not what they appear to be. TheEntei measuring Pokémon 3: Spell of the Unown is an illusion made by the Unown to stand in as a father for Molly Hale, and the Groudon in Jirachi Wish Maker is a artificial specimen, recreated by the magician Butler with the energy of the Millennium Comet.

The Mewtwo measuring Genesect and the Legend Awakened is not the one from the first movie either: the voice is different, and he and Ash Ketchum do not recognize each other. The fourteenth, the only one in the saga released in two versions, swaps the dragons compared with the games: in Black, Victini sides with Reshiram; in White, with Zekrom. Palkia, meanwhile, appears on the poster for Giratina and the Sky Warrior without appearing in the movie.

The eighteenth does exactly the opposite: around Hoopa and its two formes, Confined and Unbound, it gathers fourteen other Legendary and Mythical Pokémon, from Arceus to Zekrom, including Groudon and Kyogre in Primal Reversion. The guide to that eighteenth movie says who appears and when.

From the big screen to the cartridge

A movie release is very often followed by an event distribution of its star, and sometimes the creature is introduced in theaters before it legally exists in a game. Jirachi led the way in 2003 in Japan, then in 2004 in Europe through Pokémon Channel. The eighteenth movie holds the record, with eight event Pokémon distributed in Japan during its pre-booking and screening periods.

The TV series got ahead of the games too. Ho-Oh crosses the sky at the end of the very first episode, aired in Japan on April 1, 1997: it was entirely gold at the time and its name was still unknown, a full two years and seven months before the Japanese release of Pokémon Gold and Silver. Suicune does the same in episode 117, a month before those same games, and it is by chasing it that the group reaches New Bark Town and sets off on the Johto journey.

The movies have also served as a showcase for the established groups: the three legendary birds in the second movie, the legendary beasts in the thirteenth, the Swords of Justice in the fifteenth. The thirteenth goes further by bringing together three different trios of the legendary beasts : the fakes built by Kodai's machines, those born of Zoroark's illusions, and the real beasts, which are Shiny. The internal hierarchies and the logic behind these trios are covered in the feature on the legendary trios and duos.

Legendary cards: from Base Set to auction records

Two Legendaries out of one hundred and two cards

Base Set, 102 cards published by Wizards of the Coast and released in France on November 18, 1999, holds only two Legendaries : Mewtwo (card 10) and Zapdos (card 16). Articuno and Moltres had to wait for the Fossil expansion, which reached France in November 2000: the Kanto bird trio was not complete until a year later.

The card Zapdos carries a localization oddity: the names of its two attacks were swapped in French. The attack named Tonnerre translates the English "Thunder," which actually corresponds to Fatal-Foudre, and the second does the reverse.

The first four movies handed out cards at the theater door — in France for the first three, the only ones to get a theatrical release — and Legendaries take center stage there: the second movie gave out a random Articuno, Zapdos, Moltres, or Ancient Mew. The card from the first movie names Mewtwo Deuxmiaou, an almost literal rendering of the English name that has never been the French name of the species: an error corrected on the very next cards. The feature devoted to the first movie retraces that release, which reached French theaters on April 5, 2000.

Mew gets something stranger still: Ancient Mew, whose text is written entirely in runes, was never printed in French and remains banned from tournament play. It has therefore never been used to play, only to collect.

A mechanic reserved for Legendaries

Mewtwo runs like a thread through the major mechanics: the only Legendary among the first eight Pokémon-ex of 2003, it came back with 170 HP as a Pokémon-EX in 2012, then in Mewtwo & Mew-GX, the card Henry Brand built his 2019 world champion deck around. The lowercase and the uppercase are not a typographic detail: the Pokémon-ex of 2003 and the Pokémon-EX of 2012 are two distinct mechanics.

One mechanic was even reserved entirely for them: the Pokémon LEGEND, nine cards in all released from 2010 on, each one spread over two cards that must be put into play together on the Bench to form a single Pokémon. The three Johto beasts use up all three possible pairings: Entei & Raikou, Raikou & Suicune, Suicune & Entei. The feature on the legendary trios and duos details these groups, from the birds to the island guardians of Alola.

Pokémon ☆ already followed this group logic, coming out in complete trios. The first three ☆ cards released in French are three Legendaries : Latias ☆, Latios ☆, and Rayquaza ☆, together in EX Deoxys on May 27, 2005. The three Johto beasts followed in EX Unseen Forces, and the three Hoenn titans in EX Legend Maker.

Pokémon ☆, Shining Pokémon, and Radiant Pokémon share one trait: they all depict Pokémon that are Shiny, and all are capped in number — one per name for the Shining Pokémon, and a single Pokémon ☆ in an entire deck, all species combined. The feature on Shiny Pokémon goes back over their real encounter rates in the games and the hunting methods.

The hit point record belongs to Eternatus : its VMAX card shows 340 HP, the highest total ever printed on a Legendary card.

Auction records and the tournament safeguard

A Rayquaza ☆ graded CGC Pristine 10 sold for $1,020,000 on August 28, 2026 at Fanatics Collect: it is the first English-language Pokémon card to break the million-dollar mark, $65,200 above the previous record, a 1st Edition Base Set Charizard graded PSA 10 sold in February 2026.

Scarcity explains the gap: out of more than 250 copies of this card graded by CGC, only twelve reach Gem Mint 10 and a single one the Pristine 10 grade. Pristine 10 sits one notch above Gem Mint 10, which is what sets this copy apart from all the others.

In tournament play, the power of Legendaries is almost never handled by a ban: the safeguard is the Prize count. A Pokémon-ex, -EX, -GX, -V, or -VSTAR that is Knocked Out gives the opponent two of the six Prize cards, while a VMAX or a TAG TEAM gives three, half the game in a single hit. A big HP total therefore comes at a steep price, and it is this scale, more than any ban list, that decides a Legendary's place in a deck.

No card is banned from the Standard format. The only two Pokémon barred from the Expanded format are in fact two small support Mythicals, Shaymin-EX and Marshadow, not three-hundred-HP behemoths.

Rarities, tournament formats, and card protection are covered on the page devoted to the Pokémon Trading Card Game.

Why Legendary status fascinates Trainers so much

The word "Legendary" does not describe a mood but a category whose rarity is written into the rules of the game: a Legendary can be encountered, at best, only once per version, and for a long time failure meant losing the specimen for good. The games have softened that penalty without ever touching the rarity.

Rarity is a mechanic, not set dressing

No Legendary breeds or hatches from an Egg in the main series, and the vast majority of the group is genderless and unable to evolve: you never produce one, you find one. Twelve have a gender and four can evolve, but the exception does not undo the rule. Their base stat total most often reaches at least 570 points, and official competition sets them apart under the label "special Pokémon."

The catch rate puts a number on that wall: on a scale where 255 makes the capture all but certain — a Pidgey's value —, Mewtwo tops out at 3. The Master Ball is the only answer the games have to that gap, and the section on catching showed above why no other Ball is enough. The models and their bonuses are listed in the feature devoted to Poké Balls.

What the official polls measured

The Pokémon of the Year vote, run with Google from February 5 to 14, 2020, split the 890 Pokémon that existed at the time into eight regional categories. Rayquaza came out of it as the only Legendary in the global top 10, eighth with 60,939 votes, and the only Legendary to win its regional category, 343 votes ahead of Gardevoir.

The most instructive result is elsewhere. Zeraora, a Mythical that no game lets you catch normally, finished fifth in Alola with 31,691 votes, ahead of Solgaleo and Lunala, the two Legendaries on that generation's box art. Being out of reach does not hurt popularity, it feeds it.

A Legendary on every box

Since 1999, every main-series game has put a Legendary or a Mythical on its cover, except those that start in Kanto, where the spot goes to a starter Pokémon or a partner Pokémon. From the third generation on, that mascot stopped being an optional reward : you have to encounter it to move the story forward, and recent games require you to catch it. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet go as far as making their mascot the player's mount, as the section devoted to Paldea explains above.

The myth came before the mechanic

Mew was added to Pokémon Red and Green by Shigeki Morimoto after debugging was finished and without Nintendo being told. The first Mythical in the series is a secret slipped into a game that was already wrapped up.

Lugia was not designed for a game either: the concept came from Takeshi Shudo, head writer of the animated series, who imagined it for the second movie under the working name "Pokémon X." It is absent from the demo ofGold and Silver shown at Space World in 1997 and appears only in the 1999 one. The movie it came from is covered in the feature Pokémon: The Movie 2000 - The Power of One.

Ho-Oh got even further ahead of its own game, crossing the sky in the very first episode of the animated series: Ash Ketchum's Pokédex, pointed at it, answers that it has no data. The first-generation games and their remakes remain, in fact, the only ones whose plot brings in no Legendary at all: the myth enters the games with Johto.

Every Legendary and Mythical, generation by generation

The table lists the 71 Legendary species and the 23 Mythical species recognized to date, in National Pokédex order. The generation is read from the National Dex number, not from the region where you meet the creature: that is what places Meltan and Melmetal in the seventh and Enamorus in the eighth. The full breakdown of the 1,025 species, generation by generation, is on the page all Pokémon by generation.

In short

From the three Kanto birds to Paldea's Treasures of Ruin, in thirty years the series has built a pantheon of 94 species that follows one simple rule: the more powerful the creature, the less available it is. A Legendary is earned in the game, a Mythical depends on a calendar, and the two categories never overlap.

Keeping the Mewtwo and Mew pair in mind is already enough to hold on to the distinction. The rest is a matter of region: every new generation has invented its own cosmogony, and it is this build-up of local myths, more than the stats, that explains players' lasting attachment to these creatures.

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Legendary creatures in the shop

The collection Legendary and Mythical Pokémon brings together 34 items devoted to these creatures. The best-stocked categories are the plush toys and the night lights, six of each, ahead of the sweaters and the wallets.

Mewtwo and Mew each have a section of their own, which no other Legendary has: the Mewtwo collection to the Mew collection cover about fifteen items each, from clothing to desk accessories. Rayquaza comes next, notably with a 75-centimeter plush and a Shiny version.

The rest of the pantheon is more unevenly served: Giratina, Lugia, Ho-Oh, Entei, Suicune, Kyogre, Jirachi and Shaymin each have one or two items, and many Legendary Pokémon have none at all. Our posters and our lamps and night lights are the two places to look first.

See the Legendary collection

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Explore the Pokémon universe

This page is part of a series of guides covering the whole Pokémon universe:

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Frequently asked questions about Legendary and Mythical Pokémon