[Scoopapa]

I have to say I am quite convinced by Capefeather's selling of No Guard. There are as many inaccurate moves that will be used against CAP4 as will be used by CAP4 (if not more), so it is a very straightforward "mixed blessing" ability. Another attractive thing about this ability is it doesn't "hog the concept", so to speak. It will obviously have an effect on CAP4's performance, but it isn't going to redefine how it plays. A more conservative, but very appropriate, choice.

Weak Armor and Rattled both appeal to me, as well. Weak Armor forces a setup set to make difficult choices when switching in on a physical attack, as your speed boost might force a switch or allow a sweep where you otherwise couldn't; but it also makes you more susceptible to dying while you try to set up and from revenge killers with priority or who still outspeed. A wallbreaking set, on the other hand, would probably simply love to have this ability since it is likely to be throwing around attacks every turn. Such a thing might violate the idea that the wallbreaking set can't sweep, though. Rattled is a little different in that it doesn't lower your defense, but is likely to make you sacrifice a larger portion of your health and is more limited in the number of moves that will activate it. This is good in situations where you don't want to lose defense, but worse in situations where you want the speed. Basically, it's less risky and less rewarding. Both will discourage U-turners from gang banging you, which is cool. I think the best choice between the two will really come down to what the stats are (which we are deciding after ability afaik). Weak Armor is probably the safer choice of the two, not knowing the stats, since it doesn't make as much of a requirement of our defensive stats; after all, Rattled would be fairly useless without enough bulk to actually take a super effective attack. I honestly wouldn't mind seeing both of these abilities at the same time, and seeing which one is more generally useful.

I want to mention Magic Bounce even though it probably isn't that appropriate anymore. BMB has made a lot of demands about the offensive capacity of this CAP, and throwing this ability on something with the offensive performance he outlined would probably be overpowered. I still really like the idea of it just because of the risks associated with being a great switch-in to support moves and balancing that with being a not-so-great switch in to direct attacks. At any rate, the concept has already veered away from this direction pretty strongly I think; you could argue that Espeon is already the paragon of this idea, since it has the stats of a glass cannon, a support-oriented movepool, and Magic Bounce. This is exactly the kind of thing we would need if we wanted our "reward" to be support oriented, as Magic Guard would add a ton of support utility that movepool alone simply couldn't accomplish. You'd have to limit coverage, though, and that kind of between-stages foresight together with the quirkiness of the role we'd be designing would make it a much harder course for the concept to go and still be successful.

One interesting thing about Illusion and how it relates to risk is that it encourages you to run other SR weak pokemon in order to keep up the illusion. I don't particularly like the idea, but it is interesting how it could spread the riskiness of cap4 into the rest of your team.