CAP 2 - Part 1 - Concept Poll 1

[Rising_Dusk]

Now comes the part where we decide what to do for the rest of this CAP project. The decision you all make here will shape every stage here on out, so make sure that you give this vote your utmost deliberation. The choices I have made for my slate are those that best fit the vision I have for this CAP and simultaneously best suit the CAP project at large. I will explain why I chose each concept I did for the slate in a small paragraph beneath them. I don't want to sway the community into a bandwagon one way or the other, but I want you all to know how I feel about them before I expect you to make judgments for yourself.

Recall that this poll operates on IRV voting, the details of which are outlined here. This means that you can upvote your favorite concept and downvote your least favorite. Be aware that order does matter in your votes! The first line is your favorite, the last line is your least favorite. Make sure you vote properly. Make sure that you bold your votes and nothing else! A typical vote might look like the following:

Most Preferred
Second Most Preferred
Least Preferred

Any comments that the voter has would go below the votes in non-bold text. Bold text is used to determine what the user's votes are, so none of the supplementary text should be in bold.

Please post only your votes in this thread. Do not respond to other posts, or your posts will be moderated and you warned. If you feel compelled to say something in your own vote, you may still do so, but don't try to incite a discussion. Keep discussion to #cap.

This poll will be open for 24 hours.

When voting, use only the name of the author! The list of possible votes include:

FlarePhoenix332
LouisCyphre
bugmaniacbob
Korski
Fire Blast

Below are the concepts to be voted on, in the order they were posted. Beneath the concept is a brief blurb where I explain my reasoning for picking it for the slate.

Originally Posted by Fat Flarephoenix332

Name - Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow

Description - A Pokémon that can take advantage of Hail or benefit Hail as a weather in some form.

Justification - The point of this concept is to explore if a single Pokemon could bring Hail to the level of Sun, Rain, and Sand--through the use of a Pokémon built to properly use Hail and/or help cover the weather's weaknesses. The concept isn't looking to re-centralize the metagame but instead decentralize it a bit by making Hail another viable strategy.

Questions To Be Answered -

• Can Hail become a legitimate strategy in an OU environment where weathers are common?
• Would a greater threat/use of Hail move the OU metagame away from Rain and Sandstorm?
• Is it even possible to make Hail viable in the OU metagame?

Explanation - Gen V saw the introduction of two new auto-weather starters that weren't banned from OU--Ninetales and Politoed. Rain became very popular because of a combination of Politoed getting drizzle and the new threats Gen V brought. Sandstorm got a huge boost in Gen V with the introduction of Excadrill--a boost so large that Excadrill went the way of Garchomp. Even Sun got some great new Pokémon to abuse it. Yet Hail is still the red-headed step child of the weathers: regulated to UU and lower to be a popular strategy.

The Pokémon itself could go a few different ways. The first one that comes to mind is making a new Auto-Hail starter to replace Abomasnow and its glaring weaknesses. The Pokémon could be designed as a sweeper, defensive mon, or anywhere in between. The Pokémon doesn’t necessarily need to be Ice-type and could instead be used to help negate the few glaring weaknesses of Hail-using Pokémon—Stealth Rock and Fighting-types come to mind. This idea has a lot of leeway in how we can go and could have a great effect on our understanding of weather, in particular Hail. And with Excadrill and Thundurus gone—two Pokémon I think of as synonymous with Sand and Rain respectively—this might be the perfect metagame to do this.

And the process itself would be a fun learning experience. CaP always seemed to have the fear of making "too powerful of a Pokemon", and while that may have toned down after the last few projects, I still think some of the participators in the projects and the outsiders looking in still think that deep down. A lot like Tomohawk last project and those before it, there is a possibility that the process could end up with a bigger, unintentional effect. But like testing "momentum", building a Pokemon designed to improve Hail enough to make it viable, without making a Pokemon that rampages through the metagame that is also okay in Hail, would be a great test of the ability of community. To use the example Dusk provided in his "What I'm looking for" section, this pokemon could be the "Perfect Mate" to Hail.

This concept has always interested me. Hail is something that needs to be explored to some extent at some point, and there are so many discussions just itching to be had about what could be done to make it a legitimate and non-gimmick strategy. Also, with the recent banning of Excadrill and Thundurus, the other weathers have been ever so slightly weakened and perhaps now is the right time to check out hail. Keeping this in mind throughout the project would be very interesting, and makes this a solid choice for the concept.

Originally Posted by Fat LouisCyphre

Name: Fatal Flaw

General Description: A Pokémon burdened by one or more "irredeemable" weaknesses or issues that would, more often than not, doom it to RU or below. However, with the correct support and just the right set of moves, it becomes an engine of destruction.

Justification: Often, Pokémon are overlooked for months before being brought to the forefront of competative play. Volcarona was overlooked for its Rock weakness, Reuniclus was set aside for its forgettable typing, Heatran was deemed "weak to everything and its mother", the list goes on.

By investigating how a Pokémon receives support from its teammates, and what burdens it sets upon them, a more accurate measure of a Pokémon's worth and viability can be attained. By deconstructing and reverse-engineering flaws such as this, the skills of supporting fatal flaws and even building synergistic teams can be analyzed in great detail.

Questions To Be Answered: How does a Pokémon with a Fatal Flaw...

• ...burden its teammates? The rest of the team has to carry the weight of the ball that this CAP drops; what does that entail?
• ...encourage or discourage certain teammates? How does its weakness aggravate certain matchups, and which matchups does it go unnoticed?
• ...make up for its Flaw? This CAP should be competent at its role, but not so overwhelmingly so that its flaw is justified. The Flaw must be truly fatal for it to impact the design of the Pokémon.
• ...overcome its Flaw? What makes this CAP stand out when side-by-side with similar, but less crippled, Pokémon? What reasons would a player have to choose this CAP over another user of the same advantages?

Explanation: For the most part, this concept should avoid issues of typing unless deemed necessary for another end, rather than being an end unto itself. I envision a CAP cripplingly weak to Taunt, or walled by common defensive staples, or utterly useless if there is a Ghost-type still alive on the enemy team.

Such a mon might be a defensive behemoth while allowed access to support moves; might be capable of dismantling anything not named Ferrothorn or Blissey, or might bring incredibly destructive (for both parties) Normal or Fighting STAB to bear. The idea is not to craft a Salamence or a Gengar - a mon with a slim list of checks and little to no true counters - and not a Volcarona or a Dragonite - a mon horribly weak to a common implement of most teams but manages to be a force despite it - but instead one that is shut down by a common and often-deemed-essential force in the metagame. However, once this force, whatever it may be, is removed, this CAP begins to contribute to its teammates in a way that validates the work done to support it.

This mon should be all take and no give until its weakness is nullified, at which point this mon should become a powerful (but not overwhelmingly so) player that will have opponents wishing that they had done a better job at keeping the flaw fatal.

Fatal Flaw is a very interesting concept that allows us to investigate what it is about a flaw in a Pokemon that makes it slightly unwieldy or some such. We have examples like Regigigas and Slaking which have obvious drawbacks, but then there are Pokemon like Volcarona that suffer a 4x Rock weakness in a SR world and still pull off high in OU. Exploring these weaknesses, and then intentionally hurting the CAP in certain ways to expand on it in others would lead to very interesting discussions on the nature of Pokemon flaws.

Originally Posted by Fat bugmaniacbob

Name: Psychological Warfare

General Description: A Pokemon which can turn the tide of battle in one's favour simply by breaking the opponent's willpower or train of thought, rather than breaking the opponent's team directly.

Justification: The nerve and good judgement of a battler, as well as their capacity to handle stressful situations, is a well-documented factor in the outcome of a competitive Pokemon battle, but is relatively unexplored in terms of the assessment of Pokemon that currently exist and, in this case, for those that are created. Mostly, these explorations are limited to "Whimsicott annoys the [insert word for faecal matter here] out of your opponent", which, while devilishly insightful as comments go, does not stem from any particular kind of strategy in mind. Lord knows that a battle can be a stressful time, and a particular Pokemon can exacerbate this situation by itself. So, then, CAP offers us an excellent opportunity to investigate this ill-explored area of competitive Pokemon, by designing a CAP specifically for the purpose of forcing your opponent to make mistakes, bad judgements, or simply peculiar plays to alleviate the stress. This is, to my knowledge, something that has not been attempted before, and would no doubt be of great value both as a learning experience and a test for the CAP community.

Questions To Be Answered:

• To what extent will a Pokemon that relies primarily on the strength of the enemy controller be effective and viable in the BW metagame?
• Is the ability to confuse the opponent to such an extent indeed a large factor in the outcome of a competitive Pokemon battle, as is currently thought?
• To what extent will this Pokemon's viability differ from battle to battle? Will it be more effective against different opponents? If so, which ones will it be more effective against?
• How strong and/or viable is "psychological warfare" as a strategy against more traditional, well-developed team strategies?

Explanation: You could have any number of different interpretations of this concept. To clarify, however, I am not here looking for something "unpredictable", such as DPP Salamence. While you had to play mind games against it for a while, it lost its confounding ability as soon as you figured out its set. On the other hand, this shouldn't be a pure "annoyer" like Whimsicott, which is easy enough to deal with, because it only really has one set. What I'd be envisioning this concept turning out to be is some kind of amalgamation of the two - something that forces the opponent to be extremely cautious when dealing with it, but which is also very frustrating to actually deal with. Such a combination will, under the stress of high-end competitive battlers, generally throw the opponent "off his game", as it were, and this is the effect we should be seeking to emulate.

In this way, the Pokemon should have some sort of capacity to play multiple roles; however, all of them should be in some way threatening, and also played in such a way as to make the opponent make careless mistakes in the hope of defeating it. This is NOT because of evasion/critical hits/anything else that makes the opponent scream "hax". That's not what the goal is. Part of the charm of this CAP concept is that because it is so very much unexplored, there is a lot of room for innovation and outside-the-box thinking - this is something that cannot really be compared to anything else at present.

I have discussed Psychological Warfare with a lot of people, and I am convinced that there is a lot here to be explored. Not just messing with people, but making the player using the CAP feel more comfortable and less stressed. The idea of stress itself is a very interesting battle phenomenon, one that deserves to be researched in greater detail. I think there are a good number of intriguing discussions to be had through this concept on the nature of breaching the third wall between player and Pokemon, and that to me makes this a good choice.

Originally Posted by Fat Korski

Concept: Sketch Artist

Description: A Pokemon that learns Sketch, once, and everything that goes along with that.

Justification:

In terms of uniqueness, I think that few existing Pokemon can match DPP Smeargle, an otherwise laughably worthless Pokemon trolling OU with access to every trick in the book (or at least 4 of them) but also affecting the metagame greatly by becoming a top threat in the lead metagame. This Pokemon will borrow some of that uniqueness by learning the move Sketch and thus having access to ONE surprise/strategic/gutshot bonus move to supplement its pre-existing movepool. Being otherwise competently built (read: usable stats), this Poke could be a top threat or specialist for reasons we can't even predict yet.

Questions To Be Answered:

• How will a Poke that has access to any one move out of all the moves in the game affect common battling tactics, namely prediction, scouting, and switching?
• Which Sketch moves will become most common on this Poke's best sets? Does Sketchmon's success rely on hiding that secret Sketch move until just the right moment or can it succeed with predictably powerful moves like Spore, Spikes, Hurricane, Shell Smash, etc.?
• Does this unique and powerful access to moves need to be counterbalanced elsewhere in the Pokemon's design? If so, then to what degree?
• What kind of impact can Sketchmon have on teambuilding in terms of being able to patch holes with common utility moves like Rapid Spin or Toxic Spikes?

Explanation: The key here is that we have a lot of freedom to construct a unique Pokemon while staying within the confines of the concept. Typing, stats, abilities, and even most of the movepool are completely fair game so long as the Poke learns Sketch only once along the way and that we keep that in mind during previous steps. Now, this doesn't mean the CAP process will be directionless; Rising Dusk is pretty well organized and good at keeping discussions focused, and the concept itself has firm grounding in Smeargle's precedent. What's really being studied with this concept is movepool diversity and effectiveness, so it should have the most effect on the movepool process, where movepool creators will have to carefully balance their Sketchmon's actual movepool with the possibility of adding any one other move to the list. In terms of the metagame, there is no doubt in my mind that throwing a wildcard like this into the mix will strongly affect the metagame.

Sketch Artist is a very bold concept, and through that has been a very heated focus of debate in IRC. It allows us to discuss so many unique things, such as what we consider the best move for what styles and how best to keep something with singular access to any move in the game in check. However, my favorite part of this concept is how it forces the CAP process to react to it, and creates a unique experience unlike that which we've ever seen in any past CAP. Lastly, before anyone has any concerns about this, I want to emphasize that Sketch Artist can be implemented in both PO and Pokemon Showdown. Do not let your vote be concerned with its implementation, as it is possible and doable.

Originally Posted by Fat Fire Blast

Concept: Theoretical Threat

General Description: A pokemon whose presence itself severly limits the opponent's options

Justification: Team Preview has severly impacted the way in which we play. By knowing what the opponent has, players can identify what threats are significant. For example, if someone sees an Electivire on the other person's team, they will be careful when using Electric-type moves. Electvire affects their choices without even being on the field. This is what can be called a "theoretical threat." Unfortuneately, Electivire cannot abuse the boost it gains very well. If we were to create a pokemon that could limit the opponent's option in a similar way, it would show us the value of theoretical threat. However, we could also give the pokemon tangible threat, the opposite of theretical threat. This would allow us to compare the two types of threat with eachother.

Questions to be Answered:
-How much significance can theoretical threat hold?
-Can the presence of one pokemon wipe out an entire aspect of the metagame?
(If Electivire was stronger, would Electric-type moves be obsolete?)
-How does theoretical threat compare to tangible threat? Which playstlyes prefer theoretical threat? Which playstyles prefer tangible threat? How does theoretical threat affect different playstyles? How does tangible threat affect different playstyles?
-How can players use theoretical threat to their advantage?
-How can players cope with theoretical threat?

Explanation: The way I see it, this pokemon would have two abilities, one that supports theoretical threat and another that supports tangible threat. The ability that is used for theoretical threat would give the pokemon a boost (+2 Atk or SpA, +2 Spe) when hit by <attack>. Some things that could give this boost are: status, priority, <type>, or Taunt. This would allow us to see the significance that some of these moves have on the metagame. Without the boost this ability gives, this pokemon should be fairly weak but still usable. The other ability would give the pokemon more direct sweeping potential, without becoming so powerful that it completely outclasses the other ability. A good way of doing this could be to make it a fairly average sweeping ability (Clear Body/Natural Cure) that comes with the bonus of a few extra moves.

Theoretical Threat is an interesting concept that snuck into the last page of concept submissions. I think the discussion of a theoretical threat like Electivire has a lot of merit to it, and that it could change a lot about the metagame with just its mere presence. It's also very relevant to BW, as team preview shows it off to the enemy and immediately makes them think twice about using the moves that the theoretical threat takes advantage of. The discussions stemming from this would be exquisite, and I particularly look forward to the possibility of discussing which abilities and styles of play best suit such a theoretical threat.

Now that I've presented the slate, hop to voting!

tl;dr: Quack! (Vote!)

[Chomz]

Korski
bugmaniacbob
FlarePhoenix332

[SgtWoodsy]

FlarePhoenix322
bugmaniacbob
Fire Blast
LouisCyphre
Korski

[Aerodactyl Legend]

bugmaniacbob
Korski
Fire Blast

[reachzero]

Korski
FlarePhoenix332
Fire Blast
LouisCyphre
bugmaniacbob

[jas61292]

Fire Blast
Flarephoenix322
bugmaniacbob
LouisCyphre

[Flarephoenix332]

Flarephoenix332
Korski
bugmaniacbob
Fire Blast
Louiscyphre

I wish all concepts and their respective posters the best of luck in this poll.

[DarkSlay]

LouisCyphre
Korski
Fire Blast
bugmaniacbob
Flarephoenix332

[Woodchuck]

bugmaniacbob
FlarePhoenix332
LouisCyphre
Fire Blast
Korski

[Quilph]

FlarePhoenix332
LouisCyphre
Fire Blast
Korski
bugmaniacbob

[LeviLamprey]

FlarePhoenix332
LouisCyphre
bugmaniacbob

[macle]

FlarePhoenix332
Fire Blast
LouisCyphre
bugmaniacbob
Korski

[Feroes]

Flarephoenix332
bugmaniacbob
LouisCyphre

[deadfox081]

LouisCyphre
Fire Blast
Flarephoenix332
bugmaniacbob
Korski

[LouisCyphre]

LouisCyphre
Fire Blast

Fire Blast's concept really gets my gears going - we'd basically be studying the effects of fear on competitive Pokémon. That, I'd like to see.

[Engineer Pikachu]

Fire Blast
Flarephoenix332
bugmaniacbob
LouisCyphre
Korski

Just wondering, is this voting case-sensitive?

[capefeather]

Korski
LouisCyphre
Fire Blast
bugmaniacbob
FlarePhoenix332

Basically I agree with what Rising_Dusk is going for here and I think that the top two here embody this perfectly. Fire Blast's does as well to a degree. The others I simply wasn't sold on as much as the aforementioned.

[Paradox]

Korski
Fire Blast
Flarephoenix332
LouisCyphre
bugmaniacbob

[ToastTyrant13]

FlarePhoenix332
LouisCyphre
Fire Blast
Korski
bugmaniacbob


I feel that Hail would be a great game and field to work with, since other than the abysmal amount of similar ice types, Mamowswine, Abomasnow, and StallRein/Ice, there isn't much variety or complexity behind Hail, as well as the fact that all of them have crippling or common weakness (SR weaknesses, Fire / Fighting / Steel weaknesses, etc.). Hail also deserves some attention of its own due to it's poor usage compared to the other 3 weathers.

[Doran Dragon]

LouisCyphre
Korski

I hope just two votes are fine, I wish Toast Tyrants had gotten more recognition, I enjoyed that one.

[Gun6]

FlarePhoenix332
Korski
LouisCyphre

[??????]

FlarePhoenix332
LouisCyphre
Fire Blast

Weather hasn't been addressed well in any CAP.

[Birkal*]

FlarePhoenix332
Korski
Fire Blast
bugmaniacbob
LouisCyphre


Congrats to all of those who's concepts have reached the first concept poll! These are are strong entrants that have unique merits. Flare's concept seems to be the perfect balance of "travelling the journey of CAP" and "reaching a satisfactory end destination," hence it receiving my first vote. Best of luck to all of the concepts!

[Ralts]

Fire Blast
bugmaniacbob
Flarephoenix332
LouisCyphre
Korski

[ShyGuy1221]

Dammit, so many amazing concepts, but I think I've sorted out my favorites.

LouisCyphre
Flarephoenix322
Fire Blast