[ENZ0]

ENZ0

Nominations:

Drizzle: The first weather that potentially ruins BW OU. It has a countless amount of abusers, strong secondary effects, and causes dullness in metagame.

Drought: The second weather that potentially ruins BW OU. It has a countless amount of abusers, strong secondary effects, and causes dullness in the metagame.

Excadrill: Excadrill is completely overpowered in terms of how difficult he is to not just counter, but check. I use to believe his greatest attributes were Sand Rush, power, and resistances, but I have come to learn Rapid Spin is the best move the mole has. If used correctly this guy not just only decimates hazard teams with the use of Rapid Spin, but he consistently functions as a sweeper afterwards with only two moves - Frustration and Earthquake.

*Weather: I truly wanted to ban Sand Stream too, but that would mean Tyranitar gets banned. As a result, I feel banning Excadrill is the closest remedy to that. If you ban one weather, you have to ban all. But, the most important weathers to ban at the moment are Drizzle and Drought, at least until Tyranitar's dream world ability gets released. I've written countless arguments relating to why weather should be banned, but recently I've concluded arguably my best point. Weather makes team matchup a much stronger factor in BW OU. I've noticed that most people that dislike BW OU, do so as a result of the high dependency on team matchup that is made even stronger with team preview. Team preview makes it even easier for weather to dominate during the entire match i.e. weather starter survivability. I'm not saying team preview should be taken out, I'm saying that when you see your team and your opponent's team you automatically have a solid idea of whether you are going to win or lose, considering both players are decent. When you know you are going to win or lose before Turn 1 - no matter how good you play because both players are at the top of their game - you decrease competitiveness, and ultimately shrink SKILLS into skills. The only skill you can argue that is carried by weather is keeping your weather starter alive, which in my opinion shouldn't be as fancied as it currently is by players. Determining a game solely by weather starters, furthermore, increases the influence of luck in a matchup. What I'm trying to say is that if some uncontrollable factor ruins your weather starter's chance of survival, you will probably end up losing the battle. As a counterargument to all this you could say that team matchup has existed and will always exist, but not to the degree it exists now. You could also mention weatherless teams and their viability, but that would be a load of crap, because a well-played weather team ends up beating weatherless teams most of the time. I'm not attacking weatherless teams, their creativity and viability is exactly what I'm looking for in BW OU.