>>37338297Ice was the prototype for Steel. It's supposed to have a lot of common weaknesses and few resistances in exchange for being naturally resilient to anything its not weak to. The problem is mainly that it was trapped within the specific niche of walling Dragon when dragon was insanely strong, and then Steel came in without being chained to Dragon and was allowed to do the same niche but with a lot more room for balance and design, and basically cannibalized the whole archetype.
Ice's issue, from a design standpoint, is that it's basically locked to cold locales and that restricts how Ice mons can be designed. Meanwhile a Steel mon can be a fucking pinecone, or just evolve from basically anything.
Typically Ice regions are small side areas or lategame so they got shafted as a forgotten buttmonkey type made redundant by Steel, and then made extremely redundant by Fairy.
