- There are only five Ice Types in the 300-pokemon roster. The next least-common type is dark at 10 representatives, and every other type is 20+.
- However, Dark has a few Pokemon that are fairly standard roster members added seemingly casually, like Cacturne, Murkrow, and Absol. The five ice types are Articuno (who comes with Zapdos and Moltres), Glaceon (who comes as part of the eeveelution set), Lapras (because it had to be Lapras used as the basis for Surf) and Amaura and Aurorus (who appear as part of a set alongside the other dinosaur fossil mons, all of which require a more unusual method to acquire). Every single one is part of an at least somewhat unusual set, that would feel obviously incomplete if they weren't included.
- Only one Ice Type has two Specialties, and again it's part of a set - all fossils have Crush and then add Litter (specifically stone litter) in their evolved forms, and there is no ice-type elemental specialty like Grow, Burn, Water or Generate. Glaceon somehow got stuck with trade.
- There's a relative dearth of blocks based on ice types - there's a winter pattern of carpet, and a literal ice block, but that's it, and the latter is sometimes paired with generic crystals.
- There is a town with 'alpine'-themed items, but it's the fire-oriented mining and smelting town, almost egregiously pulling away from ice associations.
- There's also the matter of grass colour. Each region's soil produces a different type of tall grass - Green for Withered Wasteland's field area, Yellow for Bleak Beach's seashore, Red for Rocky Ridge's alpine, and Pink for Sparkling Skyland's Skylands. The primary gameplay reason for this, aside from helping each area look distinct, is that each type of grass acts as an easy-to-summon base habitat for the region to build off of - containing a few unique necessary pokemon to help things run smoothly. For example, Pink grass has Vulpix and Ninetales in it, providing a baseline couple of smelters and brickmakers as Burn is actually pretty rare for the skylands. The point of all this rambling is that a theoretical icy area could very easily have some sort of teal or blue grass while stying clear of all the other grass types' colours.
- And the obvious candidates for Ice-themed towns are largely still open. Lavender, Cerulean, Cinnabar with the Seafoam Islands, even Indigo Plateau and Mt. Silver are all untouched.
This isn't to say Ice is the only candidate - there could very easily be Autumnal or Desert-themed towns on similar bases of there being valid tall grass colours and so on - but Ice is so obviously lacking that it's the most likely leader and starting point.