I play a ton of HO steel and I think steel definitely has the potential to sweep psychic. The main reason is bisharp+m scizor+doublade each pose a huge threat. I'm revealing some important stuff here so listen up :p. With psychic, I know the difficulty of the matchup from team preview. If they have mew (standard wow mew, not some meme set) that's annyoing, if they have victini, scizor isn't as threatening unless rocks are up, and if they have slowbro or meloetta, doublade can't sweep. If bisharp outspeeds mew it's gg, it also depends on hazards and if they have a wow or sub (garde for example) for sucker punch. The main thing is there is a LOT of pressure on mew to check scizor, bisharp, and doublade so once mew dies or the psychic team lacks mew it's probably over. I'd probably say that while psychic isn't an auto win for steel, steel is pretty scary.
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Ladder ORAS Monotype Discussion
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I think it also depends on the Hoopa set they are using. But guess you are right, if it's standard scarf it comes down to overpressuring Mew to defog/WoW/roost and be healthy all the times.
I wonder if scarf Empoleon with signal beam also plays a role :^3
So, continuing my crusade for electric. August stats came out, steel is up, elec has a pretty good matchup vs steel although it depends on exca/ferro, but heat wave zapdos/rotom w are a huge nuisance in any case. On the other hand, elec does not have the best matchup vs psychic. It's by no means unwinnable, and I've seen some pokes that can make it easier, but psychic is probably the best popular type vs electric.
also submindraikou, scarf is cash signal beam is trash
also submindraikou, scarf is cash signal beam is trash
I would say that ferro is easy since the usual sets dont do anything so it in theory is a free switch in for zapdos with its common moves
Power whip - Does nothing since flying typing
Gyro ball - Does nothing since electric typing
Twave - lol
Spikes/Stealth rocks - Defog
Leech seed - most problematic
And in return zapdos reks with heat wave, so its mainly more of ferrothorn being really fat and switching into STAB elec moves.
However Elec vs Steel is usually removing thundurus/zapdos and chiping magnezone for air balloon/sturdy for Scarfdrill to sweep and Elec is trying to hax/kill stuff to draw excadrill out to revenge with magnezone, and I would say if anything the fight is more in the steel users favor since outside of mag/thundy/zap only rotom w with a lot of defense is taking a hit.
Also steel is number 3, imagine if bug was still number 1 and you got to ladder with the only char x team, might as well put elec as 2 in that theoretical ladder to get max free elo.
Any thoughts on why steel went to 3 in usage?
I would say its a combo of newer players + ban of char x.
The char x reasoning for why steel rose in usage is pretty straightforward, however the newer player thing might be harder to understand so ill try and explain it.
The other top 3 types are psychic and flying, but they might not attract newer players because of too many too good things, you can make multiple "balance" or "ho" flying teams and they can all work well and look vastly different even within same playstyles. So does psychic. However this might disuade newer players looking for a simpler type to learn and thats what steel is. Steel has a lot of "that one mon" in teambuilding. Viable hazard removal? Excadrill. Mega? Scizor. Switch in for fire moves? Heatran. For ground moves? Skarmory. This is different than flying and psychic. One may ask, "Mega?" and get the answer "Char Y or Gyrados" and "Gardevoir, Medicham or Gallade", or switchin for electric moves? "Thundy T, Landorus, Lando I" and anti ghost pokemon? "Hoopa Unbound or Meloetta" with the key point being the simple "use this mega" as opossed to "all these work just find one that fits your team best". I also feel that a lot of bug users went to steel since its another copy pasta type that many of them look the same or pretty similar, as opossed to the diversity of flying and psychic.
I would strongly argue that the word "balance" should never be used when describing what we're trying to do with the monotype metagame. It's pretty much impossible to balance a metagame in which we divide all the pokemon into 18 different groups and a few of those groups get a ton of awesome mons while 4 or 5 of the groups get shafted with only 1 or 2 viable pokemon and not much else. I honestly think "balancing" the monotype metagame is a dream that will never happen.
Somewhat long post incoming. tl;dr is included at the bottom.
The council has discussed a bit of policy recently, and one idea that came up in the discussion was this:
We're currently treating each type as its own separate "entity" and we're trying to make each entity viable. The proposed idea is that we start treating the types as play styles, comparable to Stall, Hyper Offense, Bulky Offense, or Balance. Look at all the other metagames (OU, Ubers, Tier Shift, etc). Each meta has different play styes that work really well, and others that work, but not as well. And then there are those play styles that are known and people use them, but everyone accepts that they're incredibly difficult to pull off, if you can pull it off at all. Why not treat monotype the same way? Why can't we just allow Flying and Psychic to be super-viable play styles (within reason)? Why don't we just accept that Rock and Ice are very difficult to use and leave it at that?
Under the proposed philosophy, our primary goal would be ensuring that one type/playstyle never becomes too powerful. The lack of viability of the lesser types would no longer be relevant.
As I previously stated, we're never going to balance out each type, so accepting that they all have a certain amount of (or lack of) viability and leaving it at that sounds very appealing to me. Not to mention it fixes my biggest concern with our current philosophy: We're ignoring the fact that Scizor steamrolls through Ice and Kyurem-B is basically an auto-win against Electric. Under the proposed philosophy, those two situations wouldn't even be an issue. They would simply be the state of the metagame and an unfortunate situation for Ice and Electric, not something to fix.
This proposed philosophy is not my idea and I am not claiming that I had any role in the conception of it. I got permission to post it here from the person who did think of it, and if that person wants to be credited, I'll leave it to them to credit themselves.
The council never really came to a conclusion on this. Some supported it, and others disagreed. Personally, I like the idea and I'm a supporter of the general concept, but even I see a few flaws. It's merely a possibility at this point.
TL;DR You can't balance the types, so one idea that someone thought of is to start treating types like play styles and accepting that some will be viable while others will not. The primary goal would be making sure that there is never a type that's too good. Making sure all types are viable would no longer be the goal.
So, thoughts? I'm mainly posting this here to see how the community feels about this possibility.
d-d-does this mean you wont ban everything to make ice on the same level as flying and make all types ~5% usage?
Tbh Acast I've never thought of it like that. It was very clear to me that we can't balance every type perfectly, I just used the average I came up with to get a point across. I like how you explained it, some "playstyles" are simply more viable than others, and in some cases you can't fix that. I rly like that concept of thought, and it's never really occurred to me like that. Granted if something is truly broken, i.e. Idk talonflame that outright destroyes at least 3 types, you do something about it bc it's over centralizing the metagame. However, what exactly does Zapdos give problems to? You could argue electric, but tbh not even. Thnx for clearing that up, bc I think that's something I've been somewhat oblivious to that lately.
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Well, i'm new to the forums, so i don't know how it works, but bumping for the monotype council, if they are gonna do something at all about hoopa-u (or if they even saw the posts about it)
DoW
formally Death on Wings
We have seen the posts about it, and most of the posts in the last few pages were us responding to the current state of the meta. The overall opinion is that we should let the meta settle down first, especially given that we'll hopefully get a new set of stats out within the next two weeks that we can work from. But Hoopa-U certainly isn't broken enough for us to need a quickban within the next two weeks.
Well, Acast has spurred me into action on this one (which is a good thing). I originally wasn't going to post about it.
This gets my support. I think it'd be a great way to fix the problems with the current tiering philosophy. I have a much longer post written up about this topic hashing out most of my thoughts on the matter, which I'll put in hide tags below. It was written a while ago and references some posts in this thread that were made shortly before the recent tiering changes.
Before you read my opinions on all this, please post your thoughts on the topic! This would be another massive change to how Monotype operates and it won't go forward without community input. We have another 2 weeks before the September stats come out and show us how the new metagame really looks, so this is a good time to discuss policy stuff.
Some questions to help think about this
- Do you like the idea of treating types as play styles?
- Are you ok with accepting that some play styles aren't good and we shouldn't tier to help them out? This equates to going from "All types should be usable" to "no single type should be overpowered".
- If the switch is made, what would be the components of the tiering philosophy? Do those make sense when applied to the current tiering decisions? Are they "future proof"?
Moving Forward: The Current Tiering Philosophy is Unsustainable
vanderlylic hit on this point with his (rather humorous) conversation with himself; Godchef brought it up in his convo w/ Acast (he had a similar talk w/ me right before that :P). Others have brought it up since the massive changes the Council implemented. The point is there are too many fringe cases or gray areas where our current philosophy suggests we suspect/ban Pokemon. Mega-Scizor, Mega-Pinsir, Hoopa-U are excellent examples, but every type has major threats that are very difficult to overcome.
Under the current philosophy Pokemon like these would make prime candidates for suspects b/c they decimate some of the lesser used types. However, when we look at the metagame in general these Pokemon aren't broken. Acast even said this:
1. Follow the current logic and dilute the metagame by removing these Pokemon.
2. Keep the current logic, but ignore it by not acknowledging Pokemon like Mega-Scizor or Mega-Pinsir.
3. Change our approach
No one wants to play a diluted metagame.
Ignoring the tiering philosophy is just silly and defeats the purpose of having it.
Thus, I want to change our approach.
Currently, we view each Type as an “entity” where each should be viable in the metagame. I propose we treat each Type as a playstyle within the Monotype metagame. In any metagame some playstyles are successful, some aren't. Our Types are the equivalent of things like Offense, Balance, Stall, Trick Room, Weather, etc. in standard tiers. You can chose to use the ones that don't work as well, but you should lower your expectations.
In general, a healthy metagame has multiple viable playstyles and no single playstyle is overpowered. In the context of Monotype, we easily have that. In fact, I'd argue we have more viable playstyles than almost every other metagame. There is parity among the top ~10 types and most of those have multiple builds that will be generally successful. That is plenty for a metagame to thrive on.
Correspondingly, the best players in standard tiers can leverage multiple playstyles to succeed in the metagame. They may have their favorites or those they excel at, but they can use multiple styles effectively. The Monotype playerbase consists of many people that use a specific type, which is fine. However, I don't think the Council should restrict overall metagame development to bolster playstyles that will (likely) never be successful due to the inherent game mechanics.
With these ideas in mind I suggest our tiering philosophy shift to contain the following elements:
1. Keep the banlist simple. No additional complex (i.e. Type-Only) bans.
This maintains the precedent from the recent changes and keeps us inline w/ Smogon’s philosophy.
2. Ban elements of the Metagame that are individually broken. Examples: Altarianite, Slowbronite, Greninja, Metagrossite, Mawilite, Talonflame. I don’t want to lay out specific characteristics that define these b/c that will restrict this policy in the future. The goal is to have a flexible tiering philosophy that will work well into the future.
3. No single Type should be overly powerful. If a Type becomes too powerful we will ban an element that nerfs the type and minimizes collateral damage from other Types.
Examples: Damp Rock (Drizzle+Swift Swim) , Smooth Rock (Sand Stream + Sand Rush), CharX (Flying Core), Genesect (Steel Teams), (Aegislash?) (Immunity Core)
I want to emphasize, these are just opinions and we're looking for your input on the whole matter! These are not changes that have been implemented!
vanderlylic hit on this point with his (rather humorous) conversation with himself; Godchef brought it up in his convo w/ Acast (he had a similar talk w/ me right before that :P). Others have brought it up since the massive changes the Council implemented. The point is there are too many fringe cases or gray areas where our current philosophy suggests we suspect/ban Pokemon. Mega-Scizor, Mega-Pinsir, Hoopa-U are excellent examples, but every type has major threats that are very difficult to overcome.
Under the current philosophy Pokemon like these would make prime candidates for suspects b/c they decimate some of the lesser used types. However, when we look at the metagame in general these Pokemon aren't broken. Acast even said this:
From my perspective, we essentially have 3 options:
1. Follow the current logic and dilute the metagame by removing these Pokemon.
2. Keep the current logic, but ignore it by not acknowledging Pokemon like Mega-Scizor or Mega-Pinsir.
3. Change our approach
No one wants to play a diluted metagame.
Ignoring the tiering philosophy is just silly and defeats the purpose of having it.
Thus, I want to change our approach.
Currently, we view each Type as an “entity” where each should be viable in the metagame. I propose we treat each Type as a playstyle within the Monotype metagame. In any metagame some playstyles are successful, some aren't. Our Types are the equivalent of things like Offense, Balance, Stall, Trick Room, Weather, etc. in standard tiers. You can chose to use the ones that don't work as well, but you should lower your expectations.
In general, a healthy metagame has multiple viable playstyles and no single playstyle is overpowered. In the context of Monotype, we easily have that. In fact, I'd argue we have more viable playstyles than almost every other metagame. There is parity among the top ~10 types and most of those have multiple builds that will be generally successful. That is plenty for a metagame to thrive on.
Correspondingly, the best players in standard tiers can leverage multiple playstyles to succeed in the metagame. They may have their favorites or those they excel at, but they can use multiple styles effectively. The Monotype playerbase consists of many people that use a specific type, which is fine. However, I don't think the Council should restrict overall metagame development to bolster playstyles that will (likely) never be successful due to the inherent game mechanics.
With these ideas in mind I suggest our tiering philosophy shift to contain the following elements:
1. Keep the banlist simple. No additional complex (i.e. Type-Only) bans.
This maintains the precedent from the recent changes and keeps us inline w/ Smogon’s philosophy.
2. Ban elements of the Metagame that are individually broken. Examples: Altarianite, Slowbronite, Greninja, Metagrossite, Mawilite, Talonflame. I don’t want to lay out specific characteristics that define these b/c that will restrict this policy in the future. The goal is to have a flexible tiering philosophy that will work well into the future.
3. No single Type should be overly powerful. If a Type becomes too powerful we will ban an element that nerfs the type and minimizes collateral damage from other Types.
Examples: Damp Rock (Drizzle+Swift Swim) , Smooth Rock (Sand Stream + Sand Rush), CharX (Flying Core), Genesect (Steel Teams), (Aegislash?) (Immunity Core)
I want to emphasize, these are just opinions and we're looking for your input on the whole matter! These are not changes that have been implemented!
I would agree with everything except the type only bans. While it does keep the banlist simpler there are cases when a type really needs something, such as Aegislash. The council should have the room to be able to decide for a type only ban if there ever is another Aegislash case, however the amount of type only bans would be limited since there aren't many types that have that dilema.
tl;dr type only bans should be available but limited to Aegislash cases
Articuno I said:
I like the new mindset, specially because in the old tier philosophy try to balance all the types was a losed battle from the start (Skymin and White Kyurem were good examples of that). There are types which will be viable and types which will be less viable, and nothing than we do will change it; so if we see it from a playstyles perspective, choosing to play with rock or ice is like choosing to play with a "gimmick playstyle", like trick room or baton pass.scpinion said:
While i'm again the "no type-only" bans (specially in the aegislash and possible zapdos case), I can see the logic on apply that rule. If we allow type-only bans, it could generate a slippery slope fallacy soon or late in the future.scpinion said:
Silly example:
If someone start a discussion arguing than Landorus-I is broken on Ground but ok on flying, and start calling an only type ban for it... that discussion could be possible and even encouraged if type-only bans are allowed, because it was done before.
So, if the new tier philosophy is ensuring that one type/playstyle never becomes too powerful, nonetheless the lesser types viability, then there could only exist global bans.
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Assuming this was an honest question, yes that is correct. We'd basically let Ice set up camp down in the 1-2% usage range and not do anything to change that. Making any type more viable wouldn't be our concern if the proposed philosophy is adopted.
Based purely on percentages, if you are willing to allow types to float at the bottom, you must allow some types to rise to the top (in some cases well above). It doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at the bottom 3 types then the top one and say hmm, is there a coincidence here? My only concern for future philosophies is to make sure you aren't using a metaphorical weedwacker near flowers, sometimes you have to pull the weeds by hand.
DoW
formally Death on Wings
So, Acast has brought up one of the ideas we've had floating around in the council about how to approach the metagame moving forward. I'd like to bring up another, one that I think better suits the tier (though they aren't mutually exclusive per se).
The way I see it, we've already got a great tiering philosophy, it's just hard to figure out what it is. I don't think we're likely to ban Scizor or Kyu-b anytime soon, and we're all happy to agree that banning Talonflame and Mega Meta were good decisions. The basic idea, I think, is that it comes down to total gain vs. total loss by banning a mon: we have to consider all strategies, or types, but rather than looking at each type and saying "this type has to do well" we look at each mon and say "does it add to the metagame or subtract from it?".
For example, Scizor destroys Ice, while being tough to beat for Rock and Fairy. However, were it banned, Ice would still be as bad as it currently is, as would rock, while Fairy doesn't suffer particularly much at the hands of Scizor in the first place, and there's plenty of other things it finds just as hard to deal with. At the same time, Scizor provides a highly valuable mon on both bug and steel teams, providing things such as an excellent physical wall with a neutrality to rock and access to defog on bug teams which is particularly useful. By banning it we would lose more than we gain.
In comparison, let's look at Talonflame. While Grass doesn't hit particularly high usage, I remember people saying that neither Bug nor Fighting would do well if Talonflame was banned, and they're lucky I'm not the kind of guy to say "I told you so". By removing this threat we allow two whole types to be viable, as well as easing the pressure on a struggling type. But there's drawbacks too, right? Well, Fire suffers due to the loss of Talon. It suddenly lacks priority, and can't hit threats particularly hard while having fewer mons with access to reliable recovery than it might like. But adding another pokemon with 4x Stealth Rock weakness isn't great in any case. And on Flying, just imagine with Talonflame back. Heck, I've run the team myself on Pokemon Online, it's honestly hilarious. Skarmory / Zapdos / Stallonflame / Toge / Gliscor / Stall Zard or Stall Gyara. I've played games where I was facing ice and misplayed three or four times, still won 4-0. It's not pokemon, it's a slapstick comedy.
So tl;dr, using this system we can see quite clearly that things like Talonflame, Kyurem-White, and so forth are broken, while Scizor and Kyu-B pose far less threat to the health of the metagame, and given their usefulness should probably stick around.
Weaknesses of using this system: It's going to be difficult to judge just how much a pokemon contributes to or harms the metagame, and lead to a whole load of annoying and circular discussion x_x. Even scizor I can see people arguing for a ban under this system, and it's not going to be easy to explain just how much a pokemon helps or hinders the meta.
Pros of this system compared to what Acast brought up: Our focus is still on helping whatever types we can wherever we can, which I think is what this should be about. That's not to say we'll destroy seventeen types to make rock usable, in fact that would be entirely against the whole idea of the system. But at the same time this means we won't utterly destroy poison to marginally balance out fighting or something, if the damage to poison would be greater than the overall boost to the meta. I think it's important not to give up on types as unusable, especially given what we've seen from Poison in the latest usage stats: they've had an increase in usage of over 50%, which I think is a great thing to have happened, similar to what's happened with Dark over the past two months, and I think it would have been a huge loss to nerf either of these just to help more commonly used types a small amount.
The final thing I'd like to make note of is that even in the latest month, where we've seen huge amounts of usage in types like flying, and even looking at 1630-weighted stats, those types that have under 5% usage add up to over a third of all ladder plays. Just because they're less viable doesn't mean we should automatically ignore types.
The way I see it, we've already got a great tiering philosophy, it's just hard to figure out what it is. I don't think we're likely to ban Scizor or Kyu-b anytime soon, and we're all happy to agree that banning Talonflame and Mega Meta were good decisions. The basic idea, I think, is that it comes down to total gain vs. total loss by banning a mon: we have to consider all strategies, or types, but rather than looking at each type and saying "this type has to do well" we look at each mon and say "does it add to the metagame or subtract from it?".
For example, Scizor destroys Ice, while being tough to beat for Rock and Fairy. However, were it banned, Ice would still be as bad as it currently is, as would rock, while Fairy doesn't suffer particularly much at the hands of Scizor in the first place, and there's plenty of other things it finds just as hard to deal with. At the same time, Scizor provides a highly valuable mon on both bug and steel teams, providing things such as an excellent physical wall with a neutrality to rock and access to defog on bug teams which is particularly useful. By banning it we would lose more than we gain.
In comparison, let's look at Talonflame. While Grass doesn't hit particularly high usage, I remember people saying that neither Bug nor Fighting would do well if Talonflame was banned, and they're lucky I'm not the kind of guy to say "I told you so". By removing this threat we allow two whole types to be viable, as well as easing the pressure on a struggling type. But there's drawbacks too, right? Well, Fire suffers due to the loss of Talon. It suddenly lacks priority, and can't hit threats particularly hard while having fewer mons with access to reliable recovery than it might like. But adding another pokemon with 4x Stealth Rock weakness isn't great in any case. And on Flying, just imagine with Talonflame back. Heck, I've run the team myself on Pokemon Online, it's honestly hilarious. Skarmory / Zapdos / Stallonflame / Toge / Gliscor / Stall Zard or Stall Gyara. I've played games where I was facing ice and misplayed three or four times, still won 4-0. It's not pokemon, it's a slapstick comedy.
So tl;dr, using this system we can see quite clearly that things like Talonflame, Kyurem-White, and so forth are broken, while Scizor and Kyu-B pose far less threat to the health of the metagame, and given their usefulness should probably stick around.
Weaknesses of using this system: It's going to be difficult to judge just how much a pokemon contributes to or harms the metagame, and lead to a whole load of annoying and circular discussion x_x. Even scizor I can see people arguing for a ban under this system, and it's not going to be easy to explain just how much a pokemon helps or hinders the meta.
Pros of this system compared to what Acast brought up: Our focus is still on helping whatever types we can wherever we can, which I think is what this should be about. That's not to say we'll destroy seventeen types to make rock usable, in fact that would be entirely against the whole idea of the system. But at the same time this means we won't utterly destroy poison to marginally balance out fighting or something, if the damage to poison would be greater than the overall boost to the meta. I think it's important not to give up on types as unusable, especially given what we've seen from Poison in the latest usage stats: they've had an increase in usage of over 50%, which I think is a great thing to have happened, similar to what's happened with Dark over the past two months, and I think it would have been a huge loss to nerf either of these just to help more commonly used types a small amount.
The final thing I'd like to make note of is that even in the latest month, where we've seen huge amounts of usage in types like flying, and even looking at 1630-weighted stats, those types that have under 5% usage add up to over a third of all ladder plays. Just because they're less viable doesn't mean we should automatically ignore types.
Physical Tyranitar
formerly Marquis of Blaze
To all of the thread, I was wondering how Volcanion will do in Monotype once it is released? It's stats aren't absolutely spectacular, like Hoopa-Unbound and Mega Diancie have, and it seems stat-wise, that it's built similar to Heatran. However, I can see it rising to S Rank on Monotype Fire because it is the first Fire-Type Pokemon to sport an immunity to Water-Type Moves, with its ability Water Absorb, meaning that it can be a great pivot on any Monotype Fire team. On Monotype Water I could see it being A/B Rank, as it could be a solid check to Grass Types with it's STAB Fire Attacks. What is your opinion on this?
PS, nice philosophies guys :)
PS, nice philosophies guys :)
I would like to ask a question about, What defines an underused type?
When we were going off of the July stats it was everything under Normal, which was at around 5% usage.
Now with the August stats we see that everything under Normal has stayed under Normal in usage, however Normal has dropped a whole point is usage to around 4%, along with Ground also hitting 4% usage with Dragon being the new monotype at around 5% usage.
Does this affect lower tier monotypes, such as now allowing Normal and Ground as lower tier monotypes?
The reason I am bringing this up is to ask a question, How do you define a lower tier monotype?
For now I'm assuming that it is the bottom x used types, instead of the type having to be below x usage.
And if Ground and Normal do become considered lower tier monotype types, will this rule be in effect for the Bo3 Minitour? A change like this could drasticaly change that meta since Electric and Poison are really good with Rock and Fairy and Fire being fairly decent, but Ground can decimate them with Landorus I
Edit: also will lower tier monotype have its own banlist like with ou and uu? If ground ever does become a lower tier type by like usage or seomthing then I could see something like a Landorus I ban if it makes ground way too op (Gravity + Earth Power + Sludge Wave can put in work against Fire, Electric, Poison, Rock and Fairy and you still have one more move to choose from, maybe Focus Blast for Ferrothorn and Cradily to better dominate Grass and Ice?).
When we were going off of the July stats it was everything under Normal, which was at around 5% usage.
Now with the August stats we see that everything under Normal has stayed under Normal in usage, however Normal has dropped a whole point is usage to around 4%, along with Ground also hitting 4% usage with Dragon being the new monotype at around 5% usage.
Does this affect lower tier monotypes, such as now allowing Normal and Ground as lower tier monotypes?
The reason I am bringing this up is to ask a question, How do you define a lower tier monotype?
For now I'm assuming that it is the bottom x used types, instead of the type having to be below x usage.
And if Ground and Normal do become considered lower tier monotype types, will this rule be in effect for the Bo3 Minitour? A change like this could drasticaly change that meta since Electric and Poison are really good with Rock and Fairy and Fire being fairly decent, but Ground can decimate them with Landorus I
Edit: also will lower tier monotype have its own banlist like with ou and uu? If ground ever does become a lower tier type by like usage or seomthing then I could see something like a Landorus I ban if it makes ground way too op (Gravity + Earth Power + Sludge Wave can put in work against Fire, Electric, Poison, Rock and Fairy and you still have one more move to choose from, maybe Focus Blast for Ferrothorn and Cradily to better dominate Grass and Ice?).
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DoW
formally Death on Wings
As far as the Bo3 tour goes, scp stated that it'll be Fire, Fairy, Ghost, Grass, Electric, Poison, Ice, and Rock throughout, and these are still the types below Normal even if the usage of the lower types has fallen in general. Honestly I see no reason to change what we count as lower usage monotype as of right now, as Normal, Ground and others are definitely still good in the current meta.
As for it having its own banlist, it's possible this could happen if people played enough of it however honestly I don't see that happening enough yet. Although fire's certainly very strong I'm not sure it needs a nerf, and honestly I don't see any huge reason to ban anything yet at all.
We chose "lower tier" over "under used" for a number of reasons, this being one of them. The 8 types that constitute lower tier monotype are not based on usage. If ground or normal fall to the point where the community feels they're a step below everything else then we'll adjust the list. For now, they would absolutely dominate that metagame so I don't think we should drop them.
So the council/community is deciding which types are lower tier based off of multiple factors including usage and how good they are in the meta? (As opposed to basing it on usage % or were they fall on the usage list)
Also will lower tier monotype ever be its own "official" meta or will it be like mono aaa and mono bh were they exist but dont get their own ladder/challenge/thread and are played when two people agree to an extra set of rules for that battle? (Such as saying to use only one type in a sketchmons battle since there is no sketchmons monotype ladder or in challenge)
We would also pick out the individual mons that are simply too good for the metagame and ban those, regardless of whether their type is OP or not. So we would still be "pulling the weeds by hand" to continue your metaphor. We would just let the flowers grow on their own while making sure any specific flower doesn't take over.
I also agree with you on your point about having to allow certain types to float at the top if we're going to let types float at the bottom. It's my personal opinion that Psychic and Flying are fine at the moment. I don't think either type is worthy of a nerf. They are extremely popular and incredibly viable, but not to the point of being unhealthy. My opinion may change once the September usage stats come out, but I think the disparity we have between types right now is alright as long as it doesn't get worse.
For the record, I'm a supporter of this path as well. I prefer the philosophy I mentioned in my post earlier, but I also understand that it might be too radical. If we go with Articuno I's proposal, I'll be happy as long as we can focus on the question he mentioned: "Does it add to the metagame or subtract from it?"
It's simple and straight-forward, but still very flexible, which might be just what we need.
I don't see a need for this to have a challenge option atm. It is something fun that the monotype community partakes in so all the types have a niche where they are truly viable.
Physical Tyranitar
formerly Marquis of Blaze
Lower Tiered = Not Based On Usage
Ground + Normal = Low-Tier Types
Ground + Normal = Low-Tier Types
Logically, I would say that certain Pokemon that are in Ubers in standard competitive play but are allowed in Monotype would be banned, like Landorus-Incarnate, and Aegislash. Or another example would be Mega Venusaur, who can wall of the types mentioned here, so I would suppose that it would be banned from Poison as Scpinion Guy said, that Ground, Psychic, and Steel are not lower-tier types.
Yeah, I think too the best way to decide what types are lower tier types is by council/community discussion. Iirc usage % isn't a good indicator of the viability of a type, it is influenced by diverse factors: new players choosing its type despite how good or bad a type is, introduction of a new mon makes a type boom in usage (ex. Hoopa-u), etcSubMindRaikou said:
Also im again lower tier monotype having its own "official" meta. Let's not divide the player base.
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