Gen 1 bracket round 3 #4

magi karp

magikarp costs 500 pokedollars when you can find it in any pond

porygon costs 9999 game corner coins in some versions, the true digital achievement

They are both cool, but the Magikarp line is overexposed through Gyarados at this point. They used it to demonstrate the shiny mechanic in gen 2 and now with the mandatory, party-wide exp. share, anyone can have a free charity Gyarados early on in the game simply by keeping a Magikarp in their party for a few battles. It's no longer the achievement it once was.

Porygon by contrast is underexplored and alludes to a lot of interesting Pokémon lore from the gen 1 days.

Its existence suggests that Pokémon may not be entirely organic beings and its colour scheme and the fact it came from the Team Rocket owned Game Corner implies it might have been another failed attempt at cloning Mew, perhaps attempting to glitch the Pokémon Storage System or something.

Pokémon are in a digital form when stored in a Pokéball or on the PC, so maybe they tried a dupe glitch.

Then there is its evolution methods. The Upgrade and the Dubious Disk. The former implies that whoever made Porygon, be it Team Rocket or someone else, was still working on improving Porygon. The Dubious Disk is perhaps a more radical attempt to improve it, someone else's homebrewed attempt at an upgrade, or even a malicious attack on the Porygon species.

It is so much more interesting than Magikarp.

@TheJeffers it also has its own game

yes. It is.