How competitive is Pokemon? Is it at all?

[capefeather]

Most of the OP has been answered already, so I'll just make one point. I think that it's kind of foolhardy to judge the potential variety in Pokemon by the variety of viable Pokemon. Instead, we should judge by the variety of viable teams. In the current iteration of the Victory Road viability ranking thread, there are 19 Pokemon in S and A+ Rank combined (counting Deoxys as one Pokemon). 19 choose 6 = 12996271411200 possible teams. Most of them probably suck, but hopefully you get my point here. And that's just from S and A+; the lowest rank commonly considered tournament-viable is B-.

(Also I haven't used Rotom-W in XY OU. Just sayin'...)

 

[Vein]

Competitive pokemon is a rock-paper-scissors game complicated by thousands of ifs... and that's it, which is what op is about.

Enjoyed playing it tho for years (when I believed it was competitive).

 

[Thorns]

diversity is not an effective metric for determining how competitive pokemon is

 

[jumpluff]

Competitive pokemon is a rock-paper-scissors game complicated by thousands of ifs... and that's it, which is what op is about.

Enjoyed playing it tho for years (when I believed it was competitive).

This is absurdly facile, because almost all games can be reduced to such descriptions if you ignore all elements and conditions that allow competitiveness (using your apparent metrics).

The comparison to RPS is unwarranted because some strategies are clearly better than other strategies (ignoring statistics/knowing the RPS metagame/however the hell people win in RPS tournaments) and in many situations optimal decisions are clearly the options that either ignore risk or minimise it. If your complaint is about matchup, again, there are options that are better than other options; the environment is definitely different in tournaments where you know your opponent ahead of time and can change your team, tournaments where one of the latter is not true, and the ladder, and how to optimise your team regarding possible matchup is different for all of them, but it is still possible. Finally, unlike in RPS (obviously), team matchup can generally be overcome, particularly if there is a skill differential or players do not play perfectly. Those 'thousands [underestimation] of ifs' and numerous opportunities are exactly why it's not comparable to RPS and are where skill and strategy become factors (as well as luck, which is far more pertinent to the discussion).

(I think my post makes it a little more apparent now that I believe such a discussion pointless without a baseline explanation in your post or preferably consensus on what qualifies as 'competitiveness'.)

 

[Calm_Mind_Latias]

Most of the OP has been answered already, so I'll just make one point. I think that it's kind of foolhardy to judge the potential variety in Pokemon by the variety of viable Pokemon. Instead, we should judge by the variety of viable teams. In the current iteration of the Victory Road viability ranking thread, there are 19 Pokemon in S and A+ Rank combined (counting Deoxys as one Pokemon). 19 choose 6 = 12996271411200 possible teams. Most of them probably suck, but hopefully you get my point here. And that's just from S and A+; the lowest rank commonly considered tournament-viable is B-.

(Also I haven't used Rotom-W in XY OU. Just sayin'...)

I did not play a lot of games on XY, perhaps about 350, with most of those games in the early stages, with about ~ 60 on late May and early June for two weekends as I did not battle since late January. So I did not use many Pokemon either.

I remember seeing Deo-D, Bisharp, Aegislash, Lando-I, Mawile, and Thundurus-I on a few teams. Of course, the usage of Pokemon can be correlated or anticorrelated with each other. Regarding the latter, the many competitive players do not want a team that has 4 or more Ground weakness (especially since Earthquake is a really good physical attack this Gen), and many Pokemon have synergy due to their offensive traits, defensive typing, and abilities. Thus the real number of viable teams is really quite constrained, and there are numerous reoccurring strategic motifs (known as "cores" in competitive Pokemon and in chess this can be seen as the development of pieces during the opening stages) that a competitive player should be expected to play around with his or her respective Pokemon.

The competitive aspect of the game, one that I found the most enjoyable, much more than the battling itself, was considering all these "ifs" in battle and formulating possible responses to these various scenarios and analyzing if my team is equipped to deal with these contingencies. I do enjoy the process of optimizing teams and preparing them for the expected challenges of the current metagame. During the battle, one is expected to evaluate one's position in the battle and respond appropriate with his or her resources and one should be aware of the inherent information asymmetry in the EVs spreads, items, and movesets of the Pokemon involved in the battle so you can exploit it if your Pokemon has a coverage move that can lure out a problematic Pokemon on your opponent's team, or that you would not expose a valuable Pokemon to another that can potentially KO that Pokemon.

Competitive Pokemon is much more intellectually demanding (and competitive) than most people's initial impressions of it. I do not want to play it, not because it is competitive, but there were a few months were I just ruminated over the possibilities of many battle scenarios, and I was unproductively engrossing.