But the reality is that what GSC really needs is active players anyway. And if we were to "slow down even more" the GSC metagame, we'd just give them a reason not to play GSC at all, which is unfortunate. The guys who played GSC in its early days are close to their thirties or into them and retired for the most part. The playerbase GSC has to target these days would come from the newer gen player with the fast paced style of play and mindset. Fast explosion teams are more than good enough for everybody with that mindset to stick to them and to the zapdos/cloyster/exeggutor core. So if those teams were to take a small hit, I'm afraid it would cause some of the potential GSC players to give up on GSC completely rather than just mix up their teams and playstyles.
I feel that I can offer a unique perspective on this issue. I'm not in my thirties, nor my twenties for that matter. I won't even be recognized as a legal adult for a couple more months. And I'm definitely a newer player, just look at my join date for proof of that. I started playing competitive Pokemon during the early BW era, when the most common teams were hyper offense centered around Deo-S leads and Sand spam with LO Excadrill. I grew up with an extremely offensive and fast take on the game, when everything OHKOd everything else and games were all but decided at team preview. I'm basically the quintessential "new" player that Crystal is referring to here. The reason why I feel that I can offer a unique perspective on the issue is that I'm a newer player who initially learned the game as it was in BW, fast and aggressive. Then I watched Colchonero vs Earthworm in SPL4 and decided I wanted to learn GSC. I did a ton of research. I read Borat's guides 10+ times. I went on the Mount Silver boards and read everything posted by Jorgen and Crystal. I found personal tutors to help me learn the metagame, Isa and M Dragon among them. And I feel as though now I'm finally at a competent level. After a little over two years of being involved in GSC, playing on ladder, making my own teams, starting in SPL, etc., I can offer an informed opinion about the meta.
My personal opinion is that Explosion teams are currently too strong for how easy they are to play. Certain Pokemon are too good and too catch-all. The fact that I can slap together a team with 4 booms + electric + lax and even be competitive against a stall team with perfect synergy and coverage is disgraceful to what I think it means to play GSC. When I queue up for a match on ladder I'm looking for an intelligent contest with lots of back and forth, slow chipping away at the enemy, double/triple/quad-switching, and a clear opening/middle game/endgame. Not some 30 turn show of aggression where the entire match rides on a series of coin flips to block Explosions. That is not the metagame I signed up for and I don't think it's the metagame that any player who is consciously choosing to play a slower meta wants. I think if an individual is making a conscious choice to invest in GSC and play the game, they recognize what that entails. It means far longer matches, a more intelligent competition, lots of switching, no hard hitters or absolute win conditions. So when I match into a standard zap/cloy/egg/gar/lax/lix boom team and get the same exact match I got 30 minutes ago, decided entirely by the turns on which my opponent chooses to Explode and which button I click on those turns, it makes me not want to play any more matches. I don't get that intelligent competition, I get a mindless fight. That's not what I play GSC for. I play GSC because I think it holds a very interesting place in terms of the metas available here. It is the OU meta with the most centralizing Pokemon, unless you want to argue RBY Tauros, and certainly the most powerful one. You always prepare for Lax and you prepare for all variants of Lax. But I think additionally and even more importantly, when you look at this game, you can expect GSC to be the meta where luck matters the least, and by logical extension, where skill matters the most. This is what attracts new players just like it's what attracted me. Players who are sick of a faster game, who want a chance to prove that they aren't just good at constructing a counterteam and predicting the right side of the coin to come up, but also outthinking their opponent and beating them on a more fundamental level. To some players, like me, it brings a sense of raw competition that other metagames can't compare to. I'm saying this in all seriousness from a perspective of someone who has gone through this experience.
Listen, you guys are all worried about what happens to GSC's popularity and new playerbase if we implement this change. I'm telling you people do not come to GSC so they can use 4 Exploders and a Zapdos and a Curselax. If they want to have a fast game with lots of high damage they'll go play RBY and crit stuff every other turn and have a blast doing it. People don't come to GSC to play the teams that we're worried about nerfing if we ban HP legends. Sure, they may try out a boom team every once in a while and enjoy it, but the fundamental reason that people decide to learn and play GSC is to experience the slower and more thoughtful metagame that it uniquely provides. So I think that if you're worried about hurting the new playerbase with this ban, you have a misunderstanding of why there exists a new playerbase in the first place.
(As for the ban itself, I fully support its implementation. HP Raikou is okay, I don't think it's necessarily too good but it's toeing the line. But Zapdos is a completely different story. It provides such a full stop to so many different threats while maintaining a downright terrifying offensive presence. And the fact that it's favored to beat Nidoking 1v1 is disgusting. But these arguments have been made far more eloquently in previous posts. Just echoing the sentiments of others.)
