OU Is Snorlax Banworthy in GSC OU?

[lilyhollow]

In 2011, the Super Smash Bros. Brawl community officially banned Meta Knight from tournament play. It was a nearly unanimous vote among 15 council members, and for good reason; MK was almost universally known to be the best character in the game from day one. He had no bad matchups and was by all accounts an extremely "safe" pick-- both in the sense that MK players couldn't be counterpicked, and in the sense that his style of play was really conservative and defensive (boring!). To a lot of players, this ban was considered way overdue. Almost every decent tournament player in the world either had Meta Knight as a main or secondary character. So what happened?

The ban was overturned within a few months of the original ruling. Actually it might be more accurate to say that the ruling never went into effect. The reason for this is that the tournament directors basically did not give a shit, at all, about the "official" ruling. B-b-but what about the o-official council vote thing? Here's what happened: a tournament director would take a look at the new official Meta Knight ruling. Then they would just, not care at all about that, and not implement it at all. Enough tournament directors did that, that ultimately the ban was overturned and the council was disbanded. That's literally it.

The lesson here is this: official rulings do not matter very much at all. Okay yes, official rulings are very important for Gen 6, that's a totally different world right now. But in Gen 2, it matters for uh? A handful of tournaments and a dead ladder or something? I, literally me, Kristoph, could basically do all of that. If I cared about Gen 2 (which I don't), I could run a Gen 2 tournament with literally any rules I want. And if the format actually ends up being pretty cool, and if people like it and it's successful, I don't say oh wow that was a fun little mini-test thing... I run another tournament with the same rules, and promote the ruleset.

Anyone who wants HP legends banned can just run tournaments with HP legends banned, it's not complicated. Btw that's tournaments, plural, not just some little mini 'suspect test' thing that nobody is encouraged to take seriously. Run tournaments with your ruleset, post replays of people having fun playing your ruleset. Ask someone with a server to set up a ladder or whatever, it'll be dead 90% of the time but so is the 'official' ladder. The point is, if you really believe in your ruleset then you can show that by actually supporting a scene for it. Show, don't tell. And if you're right, and that ruleset is actually an improvement on the official, then people should play and enjoy it and encourage others to do the same. Maybe you can even create enough support there to change the 'official' ruling.

 

[M Dragon]

Snorlax is the best pokemon in GSC OU. And it is also probably the most dominant pokemon in a non Ubers tier (more than RBY OU Tauros), and nobody doubts that.
The question is not if Snorlax is broken or not. The question is if the metagame is better without Snorlax or not.

There have been some non lax tournaments, that is not something new.
What is exactly the point of banning Snorlax? Most good players agree that GSC OU is well balanced atm, and that there is no reason to ban Snorlax (in fact non Lax meta is much worse)

Also what IFM said:

Because their is no need to change a well balanced meta-game just to conform to the recent trend of banning anything that enough players bitch about.

You only have to look at the Scald discussion, or how some players wanted to ban hazards, or skarmbliss in ADV

 

[jaQ]

he's clearly op, why isn't he banned yet?

sometimes I think of leaving snorlax off a team and try something else only to laugh and realize he can fill almost any role. He could even be used to charm with decent results.

people sometimes would prefer "no nypc" which I felt was an acceptable rule. This gets rid of hypnomissy without directly banning it, and it would also take away snorlax's lovely kiss which would bring him down a bit....just a bit. nypc killed the gayme.

2018 snorlax will finally be banned and hp legends will rule the world.

 

[froggy25]

He could even be used to charm with decent results.

No

 

[Karxrida]

To expand on the above, he can't get Charm legally because no breeding partners can pass it down.

 

[Disaster Area]

To expand on the above, he can't get Charm legally because no breeding partners can pass it down.

It seems to get it in the PO teambuilder?

 

[Karxrida]

It seems to get it in the PO teambuilder?

It's either listed for the sake of completeness (did you see if it let you go into battle with the move?) or they're wrong. It can only get Charm from Gen III onward.

 

[Mr.378]

Oh it's this thread again.

We've had this discussion before, many times actually, and all of the old arguments still hold up. It'd be best to just read those and inform yourself why Snorlax isn't banned then to blindly ask for it to be banned. Just about all of the experienced GSCers know and understand that the game is better off with Snorlax no matter how broken it may or may not be so will not be touched. A Snorlax ban in GSC is only really good if you haven't thought too much about what it leaving would mean.

Though this thread wasn't quite useless I would say. I also heavily agree with Borat's thoughts on the current suspect process but that's another thread.

 

[Disaster Area]

Oh it's this thread again.

We've had this discussion before, many times actually, and all of the old arguments still hold up. It'd be best to just read those and inform yourself why Snorlax isn't banned then to blindly ask for it to be banned. Just about all of the experienced GSCers know and understand that the game is better off with Snorlax no matter how broken it may or may not be so will not be touched. A Snorlax ban in GSC is only really good if you haven't thought too much about what it leaving would mean.

Though this thread wasn't quite useless I would say. I also heavily agree with Borat's thoughts on the current suspect process but that's another thread.

Thoughts on Jorgen's opinions of a year or two ago?

Actually.. I'd be tempted to hold a 'PP ORAS Ubers' type thing but with GSC OU with bans on Lax+Electric Legends+whatever else you think would be required to ban, just to see what happens. Would you be interested into looking into something like this, even just out of curiosity rather than any latent hope that it becomes the new standard? There's definitely the feeling that there's enough Pokemon in this generation that you coudl have a versatile and not nearly as heavily centralised tier existing within the generation, irrespective of how good/ban current GSC OU is.

 

[Mr.378]

Lax need not be tested especially at the same time as an HP Legends ban. Maybe try that and then reconsider a Lax ban but I'm still against the idea.

 

[Twisted Kneebar]

having a decision being made by the masses -- aka the clueless -- doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. it's about the number of QUALITY matches, not just the quantity. we'd need to have qualified people to look at the logs and make sense out of everything. we're not looking at results here, insofar as how the "metagame is changing". so that means stuff like usage trends, teaming building viability rankings, and our overall notion of the shifts of power.

personally, democracy's the worst way to get stuff done.

I dont know how it's done today but it used to be that players with a certain score or higher on the ladder were the ones who voted. So it was based on merit.

In any case I was watching some old competitive battling videos on Youtube a while back and the guy running it said hes not doing anymore battles because the metagame isnt getting any younger. He basically said there is no point in playing them anymore and I agree which also leads me to believe there is no point in even changing the metagame.

How long does it take you guys to find a GSC battle?

 

[Disaster Area]

Well it's still relevant, mostly to major tournaments (SPL, WCOP, Classic) as well as some more minor ones (RoAPL, Old Gen Tour Nights, Pokemon Perfect Tournaments) and some other miscellany (Battle Of The Week) and people enjoy discussing the game still. It's not irrelevant, even if it is probably the most underloved/underplayed of the OUs.

The issue is that with GSC it's so underplayed on the ladder that using that for determining voting priviledges is just unsuitable.

 

[HANTSUKI]

The only thing that should be banned is Hidden Power on legends (and ~maybe~ event moves - No Lax with LKiss, better to check!). GSC without Lax is just terrible, please there's nothing to argue :( (and if Lax got banned, HP Legends should be banned as well since our fatty buddy is the only good "check" for electrics besides...an eletric itself wtf)

 

[Xeze]

Removing NYPC moves would also remove Growth Vaporeon, Jolteon and Espeon which is not a good thing.

 

[Mr.378]

At the end of the day GSC is really fine as it is. In my eyes any change to it that wouldn't necessarily make it worse wouldn't make it too much better either. There are a few fixes like an HP legend ban that may be like that, but they are right now best left to their own tours separate from main GSC. More "gimmick" tours like this would be nice but that's another discussion.

 

[Royal Flush]

If you want something official, just make the 5-man council already and let's decide hp legends/curselax/ho-oh/whatever. If we feel some decisions were shitty, we just go on and rollback the ban. It's that easy.

 

[Disaster Area]

If you want something official, just make the 5-man council already and let's decide hp legends/curselax/ho-oh/whatever. If we feel some decisions were shitty, we just go on and rollback the ban. It's that easy.

already took the initiative to open this avenue, we shall see what happens. :)

 

[Mr.E]

also to below, banning HP Legends is fucking dumb. I mean, I think banning them at all is retarded just because oh Zapdos and Raikou are really good and fuck Raikou has Crunch anyway it really doesn't even need HP so really just Zapdos, but nobody gives a shit about Hidden Power on any of Articuno / Moltres / Entei / Suicune. Why can you people suggest banning Curse on Snorlax but you can't just say the same for Hidden Power on Zapdos (or Zap/Kou), why's it gotta be all legends?

And lol "just roll back the bans." Some of us know shit just isn't that simple. It's not like you just press a button and it happens, sadly there is no one-man dictatorship here.

Can we have some legitimate arguments on why Snorlax, something that is blatantly broken, should not be banned from GSC, while not-so-broken things like Greninja and Mega Mawile get banned from today's metagame? Does anyone have the guts to answer this very simple question?

It's a very simple answer: the general philosophy of the community has changed over time. Back in the day tiers were power-based, the same concept that governs tiers in most competitive games. They were generally decided on by the vague consensus of top battlers and influential community members.

We were more "Sirlin," we don't ban things because they get used a lot or whatever. We only ban what blatantly breaks the game. Snorlax doesn't break GSC. Yeah, it's really good. It's so good, it's clearly the single best mon and there's very little reason not to use it on every team. But it's not "broken" by the traditional competitive-gaming definition: Snorlax is very beatable with non-Snorlax mons.

Most every GSC team can kinda deal with Snorlax. Some teams even make it look kinda bad, granted they might go out of their way to do so. It's not even comparable to RBY Mewtwo, where the closest thing to a reliable answer you get (outside of using your own Mewtwo, or Mew) is paralyzing it with Alakazam and praying to the hax gods, because Alakazam is basically the only OU that is guaranteed to not be OHKOed (Hypno if you count it) thanks to Mewtwo's combination of insane power, speed and movepool. A RBY OU team simply can't compete with a Mewtwo team. That's broken.

Nobody really strived to record usage stats until late Gen 3. It wasn't until Gen 4 that Smogon really took the competitive reins of forums past and started taking ye ol' tier names (Overused, Underused, etc.) literally, mostly to ensure that our "underused" tier actually features pokémon that aren't seen very often (in OU) because that's where we derive our fun from playing UU.

Then democracy became a thing to grow Smogon the website. "You, ordinary player, can too influence the tiers!" Ubers is still power-based, of course, but the opinion of the average suspect test player just isn't of the same alignment as the hyper-competitive type of player that had a greater influence in determining ol' timey tiers. The average player says no to "cheese" strategies, categorizes good and/or overused stuff as "cheap" and so on, and would rather just outright ban these things instead of finding a way to deal with them using the in-game tools we're given. (e.g. Swagger ban, pretty much every Gen 6 mons ban except maybe Mega-Kangaskhan or Mega-Gengar. Is Scald banned yet?)

The hyper-competitive player only bans stuff that is outright unbeatable without using the same strategy, or at least something incredibly unconventional that is liable to lose to everything else and still not even guaranteed to beat the "unbeatable," or literally breaks the game by causing softlocks, resets, etc. Of course, what constitutes unbeatable is different for each person here just as what constitutes "cheap" or "cheesy" but it generally implies a much higher level of overpoweredness.

TL;DR We used to ban things only when they were really, extremely hella broken. Now we ban things when they're kinda sorta maybe broken... or not broken, but so annoying that you just never want to waste your time playing against it and it isn't competitive enough that banning it really hurts anybody actually trying to win (Swagger).

 

[Twisted Kneebar]

also to below, banning HP Legends is fucking dumb. I mean, I think banning them at all is retarded just because oh Zapdos and Raikou are really good and fuck Raikou has Crunch anyway it really doesn't even need HP so really just Zapdos, but nobody gives a shit about Hidden Power on any of Articuno / Moltres / Entei / Suicune. Why can you people suggest banning Curse on Snorlax but you can't just say the same for Hidden Power on Zapdos (or Zap/Kou), why's it gotta be all legends?

And lol "just roll back the bans." Some of us know shit just isn't that simple. It's not like you just press a button and it happens, sadly there is no one-man dictatorship here.

I really wanted to make a post in response to that but I honestly know nothing of how shit works around here anymore and havent for a good 5 years now. I didn't want to make a post saying that isnt realistic when I don't really know if that is true.

I will say though that this old dead gen is probably the best to try that out on... Since there is no influx of new players, people are less likely to get into and get used to it and want to keep things the way they are.

This is like discussing Americas legal system lol. You pass a law with good intentions, you find out it sucks then you have to go through a complete fucking hassle to repeal/reverse it.

 

[Jorgen]

That's not how you play against mewtwo.

Also this rosy retrospective of past gen tiering doesn't really explain Celebi or that HP legend ban you hate so much. I think it's more likely that there was a loose agreement to not use box legends because people wanted to use "regular" mons, and a couple extra bans were de facto implemented (sleep trap psong and hp legends, among other things like standardizing evasion and freeze clauses) by echo chamber politics within a fairly small community.

 

[Mr.E]

Well, Mewtwo can OHKO almost everything but its fellow mono-Psychics after one Amnesia and Eggy/Slowbro can be hit by coverage until you snuff out Mewtwo's moveset. I suppose there's Chansey too as the Zam stand-in, and Chansey can run Light Screen and play for freeze if you really want to try that shit, but otherwise PAR and pray is your only real option. (On which note, Slowbro can theoretically beat non-Tbolt Mewtwo but in reality will probably just get frozen itself unless Mewtwo is mono-attack.) Snorlax can Body Slam PAR 30% and then blow up on it? You can explode with other stuff too but Golem and shit gets OHKOed so you can't just switch them in whenever you feel like it, plus Mewtwo has to be weakened a bit first as well since it's not made of paper like Zam and RBY Explosion is wussy power.

"Box legends" weren't really a thing I think. I mean yeah Lugia/Ho-oh are on the Gold/Silver boxes but RBY is the starters. It's more like they were banned because they're the Gen 2 counterpart of Mewtwo, who was banned, and likewise for Celebi and Mew. I guess that's probably the best term to describe them though, since everything post-RBY put said legends as the box art (sans Crystal which doesn't have a third wheel legend anyway). Semantics.

HP Legend ban came way later and was just because somebody hated Zapdos/Raikou and used the shitty "hurr it's too hard to catch them legit" argument to somehow push it toward being weakly accepted. Which is stupid because even VGC players today, with actual fucking real-life prizes and prestige on the line, are doing much crazier shit to ensure their max stats and the birds are fucking gravy to catch anyway. (The beasts are a pain though, since their IVs were set upon release from the tower but you probably can't catch them until way later.) But hey, we* managed to get rid of it again good job team.

*I

Edit: Box legend ban is because they're "extremely, hella broken." Or at least Mewtwo was in RBY and there's good evidence Lugia is in GSC, in addition to Mewtwo still and probably Mew. Are Ho-oh and Celebi? Maybe, maybe not but they got caught in the crossfire anyway and it's just kinda been the general rule until Celebi/Jirachi were FREED late in Gen 3's lifecycle (Jirachi is still uber tbh, so fucking good.) and the community became more open-minded about the box legends and Mew clones. HP legends, particularly Zapdos, are "kinda sorta maybe broken" and I do not endorse that newfaggotry intrusion.

 

[Lavos]

i was going through teambuilder today looking for new stuff to try in gsc and it kind of saddened me because every single strategy i tried to implement which would be viewed as unconventional just got bodied by snorlax. it's been called the glue of the gsc metagame a million times and while that may be true, it's also stifling creativity pretty damn hard. i have no incentive to try anything innovative because i can just use 6 of the 20 or so meta pokemon and it will always be superior because only these 20 have a hope of killing lax by any means. that's frustrating. sometimes i want to play mono electric. sometimes i want to growthpass, etc. the ubiquitous counter is snorlax and the only answer seems to be exploding on it which is unhealthy in itself. especially when i'm forced to run selfdestruct snorlax to deal with snorlax. maybe this is a sign that i'm a bad teambuilder. i would like to think that it's indicative of something greater. so i would like to see more no lax tournaments and perhaps a no lax ladder in the future, maybe then we can see teams that break the established archetype.

haven't yet purchased my ticket to the nix lax bandwagon, but frustrated by its presence

 

[Disaster Area]

sidenote but I personally feel that in spite of whatever OU should grow into, if some Pokemon is added/removed or rule larger than the HP legends ban (think a curselax ban say) then a 'retro' GSC option should exist for those playing for nostalgia purposes ;)

 

[Borat]

i was going through teambuilder today looking for new stuff to try in gsc and it kind of saddened me because every single strategy i tried to implement which would be viewed as unconventional just got bodied by snorlax. it's been called the glue of the gsc metagame a million times and while that may be true, it's also stifling creativity pretty damn hard. i have no incentive to try anything innovative because i can just use 6 of the 20 or so meta pokemon and it will always be superior because only these 20 have a hope of killing lax by any means. that's frustrating. sometimes i want to play mono electric. sometimes i want to growthpass, etc. the ubiquitous counter is snorlax and the only answer seems to be exploding on it which is unhealthy in itself. especially when i'm forced to run selfdestruct snorlax to deal with snorlax. maybe this is a sign that i'm a bad teambuilder. i would like to think that it's indicative of something greater. so i would like to see more no lax tournaments and perhaps a no lax ladder in the future, maybe then we can see teams that break the established archetype.

haven't yet purchased my ticket to the nix lax bandwagon, but frustrated by its presence

i disagree with this on many different counts.

first, there are plenty of things that can get through snorlax. tentacruel, charizard, vaporeon. any curse roarer. pgon2 has a chance of beating curselax 1v1. dpunch dnite/ttars. possibilities are quite numerous actually. sure they are "meta" NOW, but that wasn't always the case. the funny thing with evolution is that eventually things WILL stagnant as the game matures. gsc is quite mature now wouldn't you say? so if you're complaining on the grounds that YOU can't come up with a new counter, is it really the meta's fault? or is it your timing?

gsc is by far the most developed generation of pokemon, a big part due to the amount of available resources in the gen. you not being able to come up with something innovative isn't exactly anything groundbreaking, greater minds have come and go without being able to make even the smallest splash. that doesn't mean they're any less of a player. if we ban snorlax, then maybe there might be a new standard zapdos set. it'll be "innovative" for a few weeks. then what happens? things will be stale again. that's the way min-maxing works. there's literally no possible way of satisfying your craving for "new and exciting things" without constantly changing the ruleset. and quite frankly, no competitive game in existence does this. what is creativity really? think about it. good "unconventional" things become conventional over time.

and are you really complaining that it's "frustrating" when you handicap yourself, forcing yourself to play mono electric and having the result not be as competitive as teams that DON'T handicap themselves? how does this make any sense? it's like if lebron breaks his hand and complains that he can't make as many baskets as somebody who shoots with two. really?

furthermore, i'd like a specific example. please name ONE pokemon that isn't viable now that would be should snorlax be banned. seriously, name one. everything that is situational continue to be situational. the tiers hardly shift at all with or without snorlax. you make it seem like snorlax is a roadblock to many things making a competitive splash, but quite frankly most pokemon are just insanely weak by design. blaming snorlax makes no sense to me. sure you could ban snorlax, and the electrics, and blissey/miltank, and suicune/skarm/steelix also -- then you open up a lot of things. if that's the case, why not try uu?

this is quite a strange post from someone like you :/

@mr.e/jorgen: "box legends" are totally a thing ever since rby iirc. everyone was a fanboy of the anime. we've always had mew/mewtwo be "ubers", and the three birds be "legends". although not ubiquitous, a lot of gsc tourneys featured a "one legend limit" rule. early rules weren't simply on the grounds of competitiveness, lore played a big part too. there was no set behavior of how things were or weren't claused. netbattle's tafop server featured a script to let you "ban" movesets from challengers, aka allowing you to make your own rules.

 

[Lavos]

i disagree with this on many different counts.

first, there are plenty of things that can get through snorlax. tentacruel, charizard, vaporeon. any curse roarer. pgon2 has a chance of beating curselax 1v1. dpunch dnite/ttars. possibilities are quite numerous actually. sure they are "meta" NOW, but that wasn't always the case. the funny thing with evolution is that eventually things WILL stagnant as the game matures. gsc is quite mature now wouldn't you say? so if you're complaining on the grounds that YOU can't come up with a new counter, is it really the meta's fault?

gsc is by far the most developed generation of pokemon, a big part due to the amount of available resources in the gen. you not being able to come up with something innovative isn't exactly anything groundbreaking, greater minds have come and go without being able to make even the smallest splash. that doesn't mean they're any less of a player. if we ban snorlax, then maybe there might be a new standard zapdos set. it'll be "innovative" for a few weeks. then what happens? things will be stale again. that's the way min-maxing works. there's literally no possible way of satisfying your craving for "new and exciting things" without constantly changing the ruleset. and quite frankly, no competitive game in existence does this. what is creativity really? think about it.

and are you really complaining that it's "frustrating" when you handicap yourself, forcing yourself to play mono electric and having the result not be as competitive as teams that DON'T handicap themselves? how does this make any sense? it's like if lebron breaks his hand and complains that he can't make as many baskets as somebody who shoots with two. really?

furthermore, i'd like a specific example. please name ONE pokemon that isn't viable now that would be should snorlax be banned. seriously, name one. everything that is situational continue to be situational. the tiers hardly shift at all with or without snorlax. you make it seem like snorlax is a roadblock to many things making a competitive splash, but quite frankly most pokemon are just insanely weak by design. blaming snorlax makes no sense to me sure you could ban snorlax, and the electrics, and blissey/miltank, and suicune/skarm/steelix also -- then you open up a lot of things. if that's the case, why not try uu?

okay, your position is "gsc's old, you can't do new shit". fine. that's probably true

the entire point of bringing up mono electric is that electrics are really good in gen 2 and it shouldn't be an instant handicap to use 6. the only reason it is a handicap is because snorlax exists and you cannot circumvent it without luck on your side, e.g. paras/crits/dpunch from electabuzz/ampharos. that's one playstyle completely smothered by the bastard. there are countless teams which get zero competitive use because he exists. that's the foundation of the argument here. it's the world where lebron doesn't break his hand, or rather, the one where his hand is not perpetually broken.

also your request for a specific example is entirely dependent on how you define situational vs viable, i can say well i think example: alakazam would be viable if lax were gone and you can just respond by saying it's a situational poke. situational as in it's good (viable) when lax (and ttar) are gone. and lax is ubiquitous so it isn't. the distinction you're drawing is being able to use it freely as in not having to overcompensate with the rest of the team because i used alakazam, vs only being able to bust it out once the opposing lax dies. which is a very fine line.