Will give my thoughts once and once only, respond if you want but I won't respond back.
Unban:
The OU meta is in a state of turmoil. The matchup reliance is extremely noticeable, and we are all having a very difficult time checking common mons in the tier due to the lack of blanket checks. This makes offense extremely difficult to effectively use, and due to the lack of speedy battles, there is a lack of diversity in teambuilding; the metagame has become stale. The two biggest blanket checks in all non-ubers mons; aegislash and genesect, were both banned in xy. The result has been a metagame where it is very difficult to check all the threats on one team without using very specific archetypes, and a lack of creativity has been pronounced. Unbanning Aegislash does something very useful for the metagame. First, it provides offense with a blanket check to a large portion of the metagames threats, which will subsequently bolster room for creativity and make HO viable again. Second, it provides stall a check to many common stallbreaking threats such as mega gardevoir and medicham, while forcing mega heracross to run earthquake making it also easier to wall. It also provides balance a blanket check to a lot of fast and/or unpredictable threats that trouble cores that have to guess sets or take more than one hit to get a chance to tough an opposing mon. This makes Aegislash a great addition to the tier that bolsters all playstyles, allowing more room for creativity while making many hard-to-check mons harder to mindlessly abuse.
Who believes this:
- Many offensive players will support this.
- Most people who support this are less restrictive in their banning philosophy. They tend to believe the metagame will adjust to the threats given if it can, but if it is unable to, will look to make handling threats easier.
- Many of these people believe Aegislash was never broken, and that 50/50s are inherent to pokemon itself and the king's shield shenanigance is just a manifestation of these natural 50/50s.
Stay Banned:
The OU meta is fine right now. Despite a large number of threats and difficulty checking them, teambuilding is not overly limited to the point where the metagame itself is unhealthy. Regardless, unbanning aegislash is not the right thing to fix a meta, because broken mon x among group of broken mons is not how to balance a metagame. Aegislash makes many currently common mons unviable, while countering a lot of them by default. Many stallbreakers, namely megacham, Mega Garde, and mega heracross are easily checked/countered by aegislash, or in hera's case, forced to run a moveset that makes it no longer ideal for breaking stall. These mons aren't necessarily problematic due to Aegislash's presence on stall, but rather, making them near deadweight against teams packing Aegislash. Many other viable mons go down the toilet, and there are some mons who become viable solely due to aegislash's presence (remember krookodile?). How easily it fits on almost every team archetype means its so overcentralizing it is unhealthy for the metagame.
Who believes this:
- Many balanced players will support it staying banned.
- Most people who support this are very restrictive in their banning philosophy. They believe that if something makes a metagame harder to play, it should be banned to create a more healthy metagame. These people tend to be more idealist. and democrats.
- This is the majority that supported the original Aegislash ban. Many believe that Aegislash is so centralizing that it makes the metagame unhealthy alone, and its presence neuters teambuilding so that creativity decreases.
What I believe:
I believe that this metagame is very tumultuous and turbulent, it has no balance in terms of what to expect, kind of like the inheritance OM (its Other metagame of the month atm). Team matchup is extremely important, and building teams is extremely limited. While there is a good portion of mons that are usable, there is not much room for more niche mons to pop up. There is also a lack of a centralizing threat that I believe metagames like this need, something that makes teambuilders think more about how to beat each other. That centralizing threat prevents too many viable mons from popping up, because when there are too many, you have to check more, and creativity decreases. Therefore, it seems that this metagame proves the theory that diversity decreases creativity, because so many viable niches are already filled. Concluding whether or not the metagame is healthier with Aegislash, I believe, is much more simple when we look at it that way. People may be worried about Lando and all that, but TBH I don't really care. The presence of one extra mon that it beats doesn't suddenly make lando broken, and oh yeah, if it is we can just ban it. Maybe with Aegislash making many mons unviable, freeing room for creativity, and making other mons viable again, we will see lando's effectiveness decrease. There is only one way to find out and that is to wait and see. We can't theorymon stuff like that, so we shouldn't use it in our arguments. I firmly believe that Aegislash should be unbanned to balance the metagame.
Banning King's Shield:
Confirming that it will change to blade forme when it attacks, and not be able to change back until switch.
I think this is something that we can't afford to do. We have no idea where this might end up down the road. While you may thing that banning geomancy and unbanning xern would never happen, we have to go back to the old ubers bans. I believe it was Chaos or an old Ubers council member who said that "The swagger and moody bans were in no way supposed to be any precedent for a formal suspect test, but it seems that they were used as such anyways." Well, we don't know what banning a single move may end up bringing. Would x mon be broken without its sig move? I think geomancy is an extreme example, but you can see the point; swagger and moody bans ended up serving precedent to a formal suspect test of mega gengar, then shadow tag.
Move banning is a delicate area I would rather not see us attempt to traverse, therefore I would not support a king's shield unban.
The Question:
The entirety of this suspect test, imo, depends on this. We can't just think about is the current metagame with aegislash better than the current metagame without aegislash. We much ask ourselves: Can we make a metagame without aegislash more balanced than a metagame with aegislash? Which can we make into the most balanced metagame possible? With our current banning philosophy, I don't see this metagame becoming balanced, so I think we have a better chance with Aegi than without. If it doesn't work out, we can ban it again, but we have to try; our other option is to remain complacent and continue this stale, matchup-reliant metagame.