Smeargle is now banned from Mega Stones. (This includes that it may not Mega Evolve via Dragon Ascent, and yes it includes Orbs) Tagging
The Immortal. (Even though it's probably redundant)
(This was the last decision made prior to council dissolution, though honestly it was 99% me)
I'll be forming a new council soon, with different members. I'm hoping
InfernapeTropius11 will be up for it -he's been a consistent good participator in the meta since before it became OMotM. Otherwise, I'm open to possibilities.
Please note: the following post was 99% written before The Immortal locked the thread. I considered deleting it entirely, as I have dissolved the existing council and don't want the bad behavior to continue, but I'd rather continue the discussion, even if no longer as "council members talking in-thread".
Pixilate Lucario is not nearly as good as Pinsirite in practice
Ghoul King. I speak from experience having extensively used both, and I can tell you for a fact that pinsirite is far superior. The speed tier is VERY significant, as other lucario speed tie while arcanine and zygarde outspeed you. The primary purpose of running ekiller lucario is to beat those revenge killers while sweeping the opponents team. Pixilate cannot do this. To further complicate the issue, Close Combat does not cover fairy's fire and poison resistances, where it does cover aerilate's, meaning it cannot get past entei with chip damage, something aerilate can at +2. The extra power is negligible in comparison to the substantial benefits of running pinsirite.
The only stone that could be a problem itself is Altarianite. One look at the viability rankings shows very few resists to fairy, and almost all of the resists being steel-type. This basically means anything with coverage for steels and boosting is a major threat. Espeed holds the metagame together, but Altarianite Zygarde is the ONLY mon that is anywhere near broken, imo.
I'm trying to see the logical intersection of these two paragraphs. Altarianite might be broken, but Altarianite Lucario is worthless? There's few Fairy resists in the meta, but the Fairy resists hurt Altarianite Lucario's viability badly?
And I'm not talking about Altarianite's extra 10 Attack, because yeah, that's pretty irrelevant. I'm talking about the utility of the Fairy type itself -few things resist it while being viable, and often adding a Fairy resist to a team creates compromises in the team design: Poison types are low viability in general, while Fire types are generally agonized by Red and/or Blue Orb, which makes it pretty trivial to have a safe switchin if Lucario can't deal with them on its own, and their vulnerability to Stealth Rock means they will lose if Lucario and they end up repeatedly switching. The Fairy typing itself prevents the myriad bulky Dragons from tanking an Extreme Speed and finishing off Lucario's frail self, and unlike Pinsirite you aren't resisted by the multiple excellent Electric types like Zapdos, improving your ability to finish them off. There's also viable Rock types, like Archeops, that can potentially tank an Aerilated Extreme Speed and kill you but not a Pixilated one.
Yeah right. Lucario usually gets one chance to set up. Maybe two or three if you're lucky. And if you aren't running Atespeed, you're checks are different, so acting as though that opens the way for a sweep is ridiculous. Ok, so now the check to a set that you aren't even running is gone. Obviously that means that there are no checks left for your actual set on the entire opposing team. Nothing that beats 110 speed and kills you, nothing that resists/is immune to what you can throw at it, nothing. Because that makes sense.
I'm talking about killing something like Cobalion with a standard Ekiller set by predicting the switch and using Close Combat. The lure set idea was secondary to the point.
Lucario can get in multiple switchins on passive 'mons just fine. Against hyper offense? Yeah, it's probably not getting multiple chances. Honestly? Against hyper offense it's probably not getting
one chance to setup. So I don't really see your point.
Fairy gets better Super Effective coverage, but flying has incredible neutral coverage, especially paired w/ fighting. You aren't going to be ripping apart teams w/ Lucario, you will be picking off weakened opponents/ stuff that is weak to Espeed or at least one of its other moves (and can't outspeed it). Neutral damage is enough for a cleaner like Luc, and you need to have the ability to hit as many types as possible so as to effectively sweep. Super effective damage isn't usually necessary late game, and it usually is more helpful to hit a wider variety of opponents neutrally than a smaller one super-effectively. This is why lopunny is so effective; its SE coverage is quite limited, but it's neutral coverage is incredible. Super effective coverage is more important for breaking up walls and stuff when you need to deal huge amounts of damage to open the way for a less powerful poke or one w/ less super effective coverage and more neutral coverage to clean up the mess.
Exactly what viable Pokémon resist Fairy but not Flying? And can switch in on Lucario reliably? And are bulky and/or recovery-capable enough to do this repeatedly? (Keep in mind that hazards hurt most Pokémon more than they hurt Lucario, and Fire types in particular suffer enormously at the hands of Stealth Rock) I didn't even bother to specify that Fairy has excellent neutral coverage because even the people arguing with me on this topic like to keep asserting that little resists Fairy in the meta. I took it as a given this was recognized. Yes, Aerilate has excellent neutral coverage.
So does Pixilate. And then Pixilate has better super effective coverage. That's my point.
See above. Also, it's mostly ineffective against stall, as it lacks the necessary power to break it and, though people say it destroys offense, it struggles against offense because it has difficulty setting up. It is most effective late-game against balance builds, and, to a lesser extent, offensive ones.
I can't imagine a point to this comment re: Altarianite Lucario vs Pinsirite Lucario.
õ.O
...A minimum of 130% w/ 0 Atk investment is not very threatening???
Any primary poison type that is already even almost viable works. Pinsirite means that they are very much available, and poison, while trash offensively has very good utility, so it's checks aren't just super niche things that have no other purpose. Also lati@sites. Js. Poison/flying is great defensively, especially as few pokes carry psychic coverage, especially if it's not stab.
re: Crobat: not remotely safe for it to switch in on Lucario, easily walled by other things, making it incredibly easy to just switch out Lucario and try again later, assuming Crobat didn't get hit with SE coverage on the way in, didn't lose health to Stealth Rock, and therefore isn't going to be finished off by even an ineffective Extreme Speed before it moves.
... and there's no Poison types in the Viability Rankings and I personally have never seen a primary Poison type other than Crobat, let alone a Pinsirite Poison type. I'm having difficulty even reaching for something that might make sense and give Lucario a hard time. Vague statements about "there's totally probably a Poison type out there that can wall Alterianite Lucario via Pinsirite, I assume" seems a bizarre route to go when the meta has been active on main for half a month and done absolutely nothing to corroborate this
possibility.
It's not diverse tho. It is slow enough that it basically has to run Espeed, while being too frail to run any sort of bulky set effectively. And it isn't powerful, actually. 110 is pretty weak. That calc doesn't even demonstrate how powerful it is. If anything, it shows how weak it is.
You are implicitly ignoring its potential for a Special set. Pidgeotite -or Blastoisinite for slightly worse STAB but superior coverage- Lucario is the single best Special Fighting attacker in the game, able to punch holes in even Sablenite Blissey, and being an anti-meta screw-you to Skarmory in the process. No, it's not horribly threatening to offense (ie it's not in
direct competition with -atespeed Lucario, other than, you know, Species Clause), but I'm getting annoyed at this baseless insistence that Lucario is literally one-dimensional. I'm pretty sure it can run other Physical sets too -if nothing else Banettite could be used for a gimmicky Prankster Copycat abuse- albeit I haven't theorymonned the topic extensively and nobody on the ladder has bothered with anything but -atespeed.
No, that would be a counter. I said check. Checks don't even need to necessarily be capable of switching in on ANY of its moves. Even beating it 1v1 can count as a check. And that's not even what this is. Cobalion is usually safe to switch in, as people don't want to let their main wincon get crippled so easily, especially if they mispredict.
I disagree with what you're saying here, but I'm having trouble mustering the enthusiasm to work through the whole of why. I'll give you that, if you meant check, you're basically OK on this point.
Anyways, I'm not referring to the move. I'm fairly certain you understand that.
Does that
matter? -atespeed Lucario can still slam a switchin with a Close Combat. That's still not a lure. Addressing the lure set does nothing to change the core point that -atespeed Lucario can effortlessly destroy this check with some prediction on the switch.
Hasn't your entire argument been based around the concept that lucario is unpredictable, whereas zygarde isn't? I'm thoroughly confused by this.
Having a powerful, threatening set that can sweep unprepared teams, and then being able to run other sets, opens the way to lure sets, sets that are completely viable and double as lure sets, etc. The opponent basically has to assume the worst case scenario and react to that, and yet risk being punished for doing so by a different, also viable set.
In other words, if Lucario lacked access to -atespeed, it would just be a diverse Pokémon that demands scouting. I would even agree that it's not got a lot of firepower backing it, not compared to silliness like Mewtonite X Landorus-Therian. But because it has access to a set that places enormous pressure on the enemy by virtue of the
probability of being the used set, and then
other viable sets, I think it's broken. This was also a factor in initiating the Dragonite suspect: the -atespeed sets were its most popular sets, and then its other viable sets that nobody had even gotten around to would've allowed it to get "free" kills through alternative viable sets even if checks or counters had been discovered for reasonably reliably hard-stopping the -atespeed sets.
re: Zygarde
Part of why I'm not taking this very seriously is nobody's really described anything concrete and specific Zygarde does, beyond being able to viably run either of Dragon Dance and Coil (Which
is relevant), and my own play experience has been that Zygarde is predictable and reliably stoppable. The Dragon typing is usually more hindrance than help, in my experience, and it just has no answers to things like literally any Skarmory. It can't run coverage or Taunt or whatever and break right through counters or checks like Dragonite can, it can't run a completely different viable set like Lucario and Dragonite can (eg it's locked into Physical, in practice), all it really has going for it is being an -atespeeder that, due to Dragon Dance, cannot necessarily be reliably checked or countered by faster -atespeeders. Does that make it broken? Honestly? I don't see how it would.
