[alkinesthetase]

darm is cool yup. as for my judgment about landorus-T, i was honestly a bit mixed on it as well... in terms of the ideological meaning of a "dark horse", it probably fits the bill. however keldeo DEFINITELY does not. i think we can all agree, keldeo is an established member of this metagame. landorus-T, maybe, but i'm not so sure. you could say the same thing for mons like deoxys-D who are obviously a major part of the current metagame, but deoxys was solidly under the 5% cut so i couldn't apply any personal judgment there - rules were rules.

however with keldeo and landorus both edging out it under 5%, i had to ask myself if i wanted to allow them or disallow them. those of you that were in #pokemon when i had that 30-minute conversation about dark horse cutoffs, you'll remember what i was saying about how i don't want us to apply any more hand-picking than i have to - it starts to feel arbitrary as to what is and is not a dark horse, and that starts to defeat part of the project's purpose (ie to let people pick what mons they want). percentage cutoffs are blind in that they don't really understand whether a mon is underrated or if it's just not being used cause people are weird, but cutoffs cannot be argued with, which is their essential strength. i couldn't argue with them either which is why guys like deoxys-D were legal this month, but with keldeo and landorus so close to being on or off, it was kind of my call as to where they landed.

i knew from the start that i wanted keldeo to be on the list because ain't no way keldeo is a dark horse in this metagame, nuh uh. but that presented a problem because if i put landorus-T off of the list, it would kind of be based on the attitude that "i think landorus is a dark horse, but i also think keldeo is not, therefore ima put keldeo on the list and landorus off it". too arbitrary for me and i didn't like that kind of justification. there was really no way for me to exclude keldeo from dark horse play and also include landorus-T, without making a rather shaky argument for why one and not the other. so i chose to take them both off. that way, i can fall back on the percentages - when a mon has one usage percentage above the cutoff and one below for a single month, the three-month stats will tiebreak, and it pushed them both over the line. while my decision to do so may have been flawed within itself, at least this way, it's all back in the domain of numbers, which is quite a bit safer for me. i am aware that tiering is based on one of the percentages and ignores the other, but tiering is based on 3 month stats so the argument is not directly portable to this situation.

anyway when i was referring to my justification about landorus-T and keldeo, this is basically what i was thinking about. this kind of stuff is also what the four of us will be thinking about when we go into cutoff planning for next month. stay tuned and keep laddering!