Power Seal?

what's that?

Ever wonder why you hear ancient stories about wild raging tyranitar burning villages to the ground, but in trainer battles on tv, a well trained lycanroc can get hit by a hyper beam from one and still be standing? Type advantage aside, thats thanks to power seals!

A standard diagram of a heal ball here. The blue rim, in different colors but in all pokeballs, is where your power seal is. PSA: If you ever notice a crack in that, GO TO YOUR NEAREST POKEMON CENTER IMMEDIATELY! Trade machines can exchange the same pokemon to another empty pokeball, and if you tell a nurse joy its because the seal is broken they’ll transfer your pokemon to a new pokeball for free

But anyway, power seals do exactly what it sounds like: they limit the power of a pokemon’s moves, so that in battles you can only ever knock out your opponents pokemon, and that a trainer’s togedemaru shocking you on accident wont literally kill you. Some people forget because they grow up around pokemon owned by trainers, but wild pokemon are way stronger than we give them credit for. Seriously, we don’t tell kids to avoid the tall grass for nothing. A power seal on your pokeball breaking means your pokemon is suddenly at its full power and very likely to actually hurt other pokemon in battles, so you need to get the pokeball replaced immediately

And if it worries you, pretty much all wild pokemon are aware that being caught means their power being limited, even if they don’t know exactly how. Thats why even the sweetest wild garchomp you have a bond to likely won’t just agree to be caught, lots of pokemon want a battle before you can catch them because they want you to prove you’re stronger than the power they’d be giving up