Metagame SV OU Metagame Discussion v4

The solution to the species clause stuff is simple. Just update it to “form clause” and make it so you just can’t use two of the same form on a team, with us using the same definition of “forms” as how we tier them. If we tier them separately, they can count as two separate team slots. If we tier them the same, they count as one Pokémon.
 
The solution to the species clause stuff is simple. Just update it to “form clause” and make it so you just can’t use two of the same form on a team, with us using the same definition of “forms” as how we tier them. If we tier them separately, they can count as two separate team slots. If we tier them the same, they count as one Pokémon.

The problem is that Species Clause functionally exists in the games themselves, and if we're serious about being a Pokemon simulator, it should be retained.
 
The problem is that Species Clause functionally exists in the games themselves, and if we're serious about being a Pokemon simulator, it should be retained.
You can use custom rulesets with no species clause; it’s entirely possible to play on-cart without it. As a result, implementing it in our official format is entirely our choice, just like we choose NOT to implement item clause. It’s really not hard for us to change species clause to form clause and it’s incredibly overdue tbh.
 
The solution to the species clause stuff is simple. Just update it to “form clause” and make it so you just can’t use two of the same form on a team, with us using the same definition of “forms” as how we tier them. If we tier them separately, they can count as two separate team slots. If we tier them the same, they count as one Pokémon.
While this is the kind of simple definition Smogon favors, the practical consequences that this has are mostly bad. Arceus Forms are technically tiered separately (though this is only relevant to Ubers UU afaik), same with Silvally forms. While this is subjective, I don't think many people want to play in a meta where teams can spam those mons. Those two are the most egregious cases but there are a couple more cases of minor differences, especially where it's basically just a type difference (Oricorio, Rotom, Ogerpon)*. Lastly, Mega forms were also tiered separately, though in practical terms this could be interpreted as just standard item bans with regards to the mega stones. Removing the species lock leads to questions such as "can you use a slowbro and a second slowbro holding a mega stone on the same team?" which again is not particularly desirable to anyone.

If any action on Species Clause is desirable (and nobody has yet justified that it is) it should be very restricted, perhaps only loosening with regards to regional forms (Alola, Galar, Hisui, Paldea). These form changes consistently are extremely different between regions, changing stat distribution, typing, and ability in almost every case.

*yes i glossed over nuances with all 3 of these
 
Lastly, Mega forms were also tiered separately, though in practical terms this could be interpreted as just standard item bans with regards to the mega stones. Removing the species lock leads to questions such as "can you use a slowbro and a second slowbro holding a mega stone on the same team?" which again is not particularly desirable to anyone.

While I don't have a direct horse in this race, I think on this point specifically, it wouldn't have come up because you couldn't have a Pokemon "start" in the Mega Form, so you'd still be running two Slowbro, even if one had the Mega Stone. So regardless of a hypothetical amendment for Forms tiered separately, there was no way to run the Mega without a team slot being the base Pokemon, compared to other cases brought up throughout this topic.
 
While this is the kind of simple definition Smogon favors, the practical consequences that this has are mostly bad. Arceus Forms are technically tiered separately (though this is only relevant to Ubers UU afaik), same with Silvally forms. While this is subjective, I don't think many people want to play in a meta where teams can spam those mons.
Honestly, genuinely, I don’t see a problem allowing someone to use a bunch of Silvally forms on one team outside of the lowest tiers. Sounds like a gimmick team to me, like if someone chose to make a team with 6 Eeveelutions or something, and if it does somehow break Silvally in certain tiers then tiering action can just follow as a result. Arceus is the only Pokémon I could see consistently being an issue under form clause, but I’d rather Ubers just choose how to handle that on their own rather than limit every single other tier because of that; ottherwise, you disallow cool cores like Zapdos-K + Zapdos-G or Rotom-W + Rotom-H for no real justifiable reason. I really feel changing species clause to form clause would change very little and have basically no negative impact.

EDIT: I feel I should add something: Silvally tends to be a bad Pokémon because any given form of Silvally tend to be outclassed at whatever it tries to do by something else. Stacking 6 of em means you just now have 6 Pokémon who tend to be outclassed by what they do by something else, except now those 6 Pokémon on your team also share their movepools with each other too. Only in the lowest level metas is Silvally powerful enough relative to its competition to matter, and if some Silvally formes become broken in those metas because they can be utilized alongside other good Silvally formes, those metas can act accordingly. But I really doubt you’ll ever see more than 2 Silvally forms on a team even in the metas where it’s best because there’s too much movepool overlap.
 
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You can use custom rulesets with no species clause; it’s entirely possible to play on-cart without it. As a result, implementing it in our official format is entirely our choice, just like we choose NOT to implement item clause. It’s really not hard for us to change species clause to form clause and it’s incredibly overdue tbh.

custom matches on cart are just like custom matches on showdown and they’re not even official battles. So this doesn’t really work for your argument. Past that, there’s nothing overdue about species clause. It’s a rule in any official format on cart.

Beyond that there is zero practical competitively minded reason to change species clause to allow some arbitrary team combinations. No combination of Pokémon formes allowed through this rule would even be anything more than a gimmick and there’s no reason to change a rule just to allow more gimmicks. You need a real strong argument to justify a change like that and no one has made one. And no RotomW+RotomH are not “cool” cores, they’re gimmicks.
 
custom matches on cart are just like custom matches on showdown and they’re not even official battles. So this doesn’t really work for your argument. Past that, there’s nothing overdue about species clause. It’s a rule in any official format on cart.
In that case, your argument doesn’t hold water for any other tiering deviation we do from official formats. There are plenty of other “official” rules we choose not to institute like item clause and other “nonofficial” rules we do choose to institute like OHKO move clause. Unless we’re talking about something that literally can’t be done on cart like actually modifying the way the game itself works, (like we did with Sleep Clause), this argument does not reflect Smogon’s tiering policy.
Beyond that there is zero practical competitively minded reason to change species clause to allow some arbitrary team combinations. No combination of Pokémon formes allowed through this rule would even be anything more than a gimmick and there’s no reason to change a rule just to allow more gimmicks. You need a real strong argument to justify a change like that and no one has made one. And no RotomW+RotomH are not “cool” cores, they’re gimmicks.
I don’t particularly agree that there’s no potential for cool cores now or down the line, but let’s just say for the sake of argument that every single combination of variants is a meaningless gimmick. Imo this would flip your argument on its head: if it doesn’t have a meaningful impact on the tier, why are we banning them to begin with? Bans have to serve a purpose. Refusing to relook at a ban because undoing it wouldn’t make an impact is a backwards way to approach tiering policy. If a ban doesn’t serve its original purpose anymore, then the act of upholding it is in and of itself intentional commitment to faulty/outdated tiering. We don’t ban people from laddering with themed teams because they’re “cringe”, do we?
 
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In that case, your argument doesn’t hold water for any other tiering deviation we do from official formats. There are plenty of other “official” rules we choose not to institute like item clause and other “nonofficial” rules we do choose to institute like OHKO move clause. Unless we’re talking about something that literally can’t be done on cart like actually modifying the way the game itself works, (like we did with Sleep Clause), this argument does not reflect Smogon’s tiering policy.

OHKO clause is the result of a literal ban for the sake of competitive gameplay and balance.

I don’t particularly agree that there’s no potential for cool cores now or down the line, but let’s just say for the sake of argument that every single combination of variants is a meaningless gimmick. Imo this would flip your argument on its head: if it doesn’t have a meaningful impact on the tier, why are we banning them to begin with? Bans have to serve a purpose. Refusing to relook at a ban because undoing it wouldn’t make an impact is a backwards way to approach tiering policy. If a ban doesn’t serve its original purpose anymore, then the act of upholding it is in and of itself intentional commitment to faulty/outdated tiering. We don’t ban people from laddering with themed teams because they’re “cringe”, do we?

Species Clause exists as a balancing tool itself, preventing use of the same pokemon (and regional formes ARE treated as the same pokemon), and the rule has been in its current form since... well... as far as I can remember.

What you and some other players in this thread argue is effectively twisting the rule to allow specific circumstances but why should we? The onus is on you to prove why status quo should be changed. Why should the rules be bended or twisted to specifically allow these combinations? Bending rules arbitrarily because you want to use weird/gimmicky strategies isn't really the way to go. It's not really logical or consistent and consistency is what you want with rules in a competitive game.

Also, in what way does the Species Clause "ban" not serve its original purpose. Nothing has changed for that to be the case. It exists for balance purposes and I don't know what else to say.
 
Dunno, A lot of the Galar pokemon are just whole ass new mons. They have nearly entirely different move sets, typings, and usages. The Kings(TM) are all effectively similar but function in a manner that they usually don't play out with in practice. While they share appearances and look the same, you can't really say to me that ZapG and ZapK function the same even outside of typings.

Having multiple of the exact mon is stupid, and ergo so is allowing 8 Literal Gods. But allowing someone to use 2X birds or Kings doesn't seem all that dramatic to me. The longer the game goes on the more regional variants will show up, meaning the pool of mons that get ousted will only increase--Even the Paradox forms are examples of this. Feels like something that would be better to review and ponder now instead of later.
 
i still haven't seen any valid arguments for editing species clause. nothing about how changing things from the status quo in this way would help the meta, or solve any real problems, or do anything actually productive. i'm not hearing "allowing the two slowking forms on a team together will ease builder pressure against [threat] and [cheese playstyle]" or "if we're allowed to run teal and wellspring ogerpon together, it greatly expands the counterplay against [mon that should have been banned 3 months ago] and [mon that should have been banned a year ago]". what i'm hearing is "smogon's rules can be different from game freak's and therefore they must be different" and "it has to change because the clause is old and i don't like it" and "i want to peak at 1150 with a dogwater no-synergy double-zapdos core that i'll steal from a blimax video because i don't have enough self-confidence to steal from aim". people are gonna accuse me of strawmanning for saying this but it's the truth
 
Kommo-o isn't common or good enough to justify this, being able to hit Tusk without committing to Tera is orders of magnitude more useful.
Yes, that's why I said fringe case. It's not good enough to justify it, but it is another option to look at. I would personally still run Alluring Voice.

To avoid double posting, my 2 cents on the matter of Species Clause: I think it's a cool idea if regional formes are allowed to run alongside each other, as someone mentioned previously they often feel like a whole new Pokemon. Even right now, the prospect seems pointless but in the future there will be more regional forms and can actually offer competitve merit then. While this is hypothetical, outright shutting down discussion related to this seems a bit harsh.
 
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i still haven't seen any valid arguments for editing species clause. nothing about how changing things from the status quo in this way would help the meta, or solve any real problems, or do anything actually productive.
Oh come on, even you know this is untrue as people have given genuine arguements about changing the status quo, so don't act like people are not doing that. The arguement is that with a forms clause, you can use things together that you could not do together. You could use zapdos and zapdos galar together, which while not the absolute best core, would still be something that could have some fun applications as the two mons play entirely differently. One is an annoying physically defensive (in this case I'm talking about static) special attacker, while the other is a phsyical wallbreaker that has an alright speedstat and a very spammable stab move (this being thunderous kick). Normally, you would have to choose one or the other in a team, but hey, now you don't.
i'm not hearing "allowing the two slowking forms on a team together will ease builder pressure against [threat] and [cheese playstyle]" or "if we're allowed to run teal and wellspring ogerpon together, it greatly expands the counterplay against [mon that should have been banned 3 months ago] and [mon that should have been banned a year ago]".
And why does this have to be the status quo for a change? Like, if something feels wrong, then it probably should be changed. Something doesn't have to feel like it contributes immensly to a meta in order for change to be implemented, it can be as simple as "oh, this rule may be a bit outdated and stifles some creativy, let's change it". Which is honestly, enough for me if there isn't going to be repreccusions that hurt the meta, which this change I don't think will. The worst one might be multiple ogerpon forms, which as stated somewhere in this thread beforehand, all have a u-turn weakness which can be taken advantage of.
"smogon's rules can be different from game freak's and therefore they must be different" and "it has to change because the clause is old and i don't like it"
No? If you really think this, then read through the thread again, because you are trying to make up reasons why people are doing this that nobody has said. What people ARE saying if anything is that, we CAN make rules different from game freak. And now the 'cart accuracy' arguements aren't even applicable because somebody has shown how you can create custom games without species clause. And if somebody says "but its not an official game" then we shouldn't have item clause since that's something that is VERY prevelant on cart games. So either you accpet that we use these 'custom' games or we stick fully to it and reimplement item clause. And I don't think anybody wants to implement item clause again because that would be a step backward.
"i want to peak at 1150 with a dogwater no-synergy double-zapdos core that i'll steal from a blimax video because i don't have enough self-confidence to steal from aim"
Okay, I'm not going to address this part long because it frankly is just a bad faith arguement (You KNOW it is, don't even try to argue. You are trying to insult others who genuinelly want change by suggesting they are low ladder players that only steal from blimax's videos) but who the hell cares if the core is bad (though I doubt it would be as these two do vastly different things and thus probably have a decent amount of synergy), it gives people more options to work with and nothing is going to be lost because of that change.


Frankly, I'm astonished by the pushback on this 'form clause". It doesn't really change a whole lot in the meta, but does allow a bit more creativity. There really isn't much of an issue with changing it other than "well, its a rule change and it wouldn't make the meta insanely better", which frankly I don't think should be the baseline for making a change. TheTraininator put it perfectly, it's not a hard change to make.

And this is coming from somebody who doesn't care if the change is implemented or not, but can we please stop making this such a big fucking deal. It's annoying how this was shut down with the power of a thousand suns, this is what stops people from suggesting things that could be cool.
 
And why does this have to be the status quo for a change? Like, if something feels wrong, then it probably should be changed. Something doesn't have to feel like it contributes immensly to a meta in order for change to be implemented, it can be as simple as "oh, this rule may be a bit outdated and stifles some creativy, let's change it". Which is honestly, enough for me if there isn't going to be repreccusions that hurt the meta, which this change I don't think will. The worst one might be multiple ogerpon forms, which as stated somewhere in this thread beforehand, all have a u-turn weakness which can be taken advantage of.
I also feel this. As someone previously mentioned, GameFreak also realized they messed this up and instead of trying to give regional form to everything, they now create "similar but not quite the same" Pokemon, like Quagsire and Clodsire to circumvent their own rule. I think as a fan-controlled community, we are able to, or at least should be open minded to, making changes that GameFreak wanted to but could not.

Though, the council probably already had their hands full post survey, so I don't think this can go anywhere soon, no matter what anyone says.
 
Oh come on, even you know this is untrue as people have given genuine arguements about changing the status quo, so don't act like people are not doing that. The arguement is that with a forms clause, you can use things together that you could not do together. You could use zapdos and zapdos galar together, which while not the absolute best core, would still be something that could have some fun applications as the two mons play entirely differently. One is an annoying physically defensive (in this case I'm talking about static) special attacker, while the other is a phsyical wallbreaker that has an alright speedstat and a very spammable stab move (this being thunderous kick). Normally, you would have to choose one or the other in a team, but hey, now you don't.

While I disagree with how Buzzwole wrote it, they are correct. There really hasn't been a compelling argument made in favor of changing the status quo on species clause. "Fun" is not an argument or justification for doing so either.

No? If you really think this, then read through the thread again, because you are trying to make up reasons why people are doing this that nobody has said. What people ARE saying if anything is that, we CAN make rules different from game freak.

No compelling arguments have been made for why we SHOULD consider changing the rule.

Frankly, I'm astonished by the pushback on this 'form clause". It doesn't really change a whole lot in the meta, but does allow a bit more creativity. There really isn't much of an issue with changing it other than "well, its a rule change and it wouldn't make the meta insanely better", which frankly I don't think should be the baseline for making a change. TheTraininator put it perfectly, it's not a hard change to make.

And this is coming from somebody who doesn't care if the change is implemented or not, but can we please stop making this such a big fucking deal. It's annoying how this was shut down with the power of a thousand suns, this is what stops people from suggesting things that could be cool.

Because there's no point to it? It's akin to arguing for Drypass despite such a change having basically zero impact. There's no reason to suddenly change such a long standing rule and you need a better argument than "it allows fun cores and more creativity" when most of that "creativity" isn't even practical or applicable in serious games.

What's annoying is having this same topic keep coming back up despite being shut down multiple times in the past, and the arguments for such a change basically not changing between tries so it ends up doing nothing but creating a pointless back and forth that goes nowhere and wastes multiple pages of what could be actual metagame discussion or innovation.

GameFreak also realized they messed this up and instead of trying to give regional form to everything, they now create "similar but not quite the same" Pokemon, like Quagsire and Clodsire to circumvent their own rule. I think as a fan-controlled community, we are able to, or at least should be open minded to, making changes that GameFreak wanted to but could not.

Gamefreak didn't "mess up", they just branched out in how they give touch ups to older pokemon. Quag and Clod are completely different pokemon. There also is no "rule" of theirs that they are trying to circumvent.
 
Gamefreak didn't "mess up", they just branched out in how they give touch ups to older pokemon. Quag and Clod are completely different pokemon. There also is no "rule" of theirs that they are trying to circumvent.
Considering Species Clause IS a competitive rule, that is something that they are designing the game around, which in other words mean they're circumventing it. Same as you said, Kantonian Zapdos and Galarian Zapdos are as different as Quagsire and Clodsire to each other, and yet they're treated differently by the Species Clause (which again, is an official rule), as one combination is legal while the other one is not.

While I agree this isn't a concrete proof or anything, you can see these as examples of giving touch up to old Pokemon while not making the old one obsolete/making the new one pointless. Surely Zapdos and GZapdos core might not be THAT good, but it is undeniable they play completely like different Pokemon.

P/s: That's not to say I think we should go forward with this now, immediately or in the near future, but it's a discussion with merit because new region = new forms to explore. I just want to make this clear because I have no horses in this race, I just don't think it should be met with such extreme prejudice.
 
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This discussion of "forme clause" is getting nowhere, and is honestly unproductive. In fact, it only discourages further productive discussion about actual important aspects of the metagame, such as suspects we honestly need. I think some of you may know where I'm going with this, but after over 15 experienced players wrote in objections on the last community survey, I believe something needs to change.

Gholdengo needs to be Gholdengone.

This thing is an actual plague to any defensive builds, as its ability to prevent any viable removal outside of Cinderace, Maushold, and...
this guy => :weezing-galar: means that hazards are, in fact, staying up. One mon's metagame presence mandating that stall and fat run 6 boots or maybe 5 boots and a toxic orb is beyond metagame warping and honestly just this fact alone should warrant a ban. No mon in any metagame should force building mandates this heavily, but it doesn't stop there.

It's 130 spatk and 120 bp stab move with a small drawback and no immunities + nasty plot is SINISTER for punching holes, and its other stab + focus blast is unresisted outside of one singular fraud ( :zoroark-hisui: ). It doesn't just ruin stall in the builder, it ruins stall and fat in the game by clicking Psyshock and forcing tera, when tera is NEEDED to deal with other stallbreaking staples like our favorite masked grass type. (It's not Meowscarada.)

It spreads status with twave and breaks with Hex, it recovers off any damage when dealing with passive threats, it blocks encore, taunt, wisp,twave, you name it. Its defensive and offensive typing is already excellent, it's ability drives it so far off the edge. It ignores stoss, body press, toxic, and eq with air balloon on, removing most of stall's ways of hitting it in return, while only being reliably defensively checked by tera steel amnesia clodsire.

Even after you kill it, it's already likely done its job, easily ohkoing tusk with mir, or treads with +2 shadow ball. Once dhengo is gone, you're likely not getting another chance to spin, and if you're just running foggers, dhengo is never going to die because all it needs to do is come in on defog attempts.

This mon is so constricting in every way possible and is beyond unhealthy in every sense of the word. PLEASE get this mon a supect test. thanks !!
 
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You'd need a very good reason to make smogon tiering even more distant from cart accuracy, and running extremely niche cores that would not improve the tier in any meaningful way is nowhere near good enough. I understand that some of the regional forms are very different from their counterparts but at the end of the day you're asking to break a clause that undeniably makes the game better for the sake of running two sub OU Pokémon on the same team.
 
I have no dog in the species clause fight, but some of this seems a bit dogmatic. Smogon already deviates from cartridge with things like how we handle bans. We don't treat mons with different forms the same when we choose to ban them or not. This is partly why Lando-T is OU and the other Landorus gets banned to Ubers every gen. This is why A-tails is usually ranked higher than regular Ninetails. They are functionally different mons that play differently.

Clodsire versus Quagsire and Zapdos verse Gapdos have already been brought up here as functionally different from each other. Choosing to exclude one pair and not the other really is an archaism with little functional difference.

Also, people keep bringing up Ogerpon. We banned only one of four Ogerpon forms so far. Although stacking the remaining 3 all on a single team sounds goofy, they are still functionally different mons from each other. Cornerstone has Sturdy and different typing from Wellspring. Grasspon fills an entirely different niche than both of them with the ability to boost its speed in exchange for worse coverage. They aren't the same mon just because they share part of the same name.

And can we quit it with the strawmanning already? Like just because I just had a paragraph explaining how the Ogerpon forms are different doesn't mean I'm going to want to put all 3 on my team at the same time. Wanting to change it just to use niche options in the most exaggerated example is not really the point anyone here is making. We all know somebody would try to bad faith it like that if I didn't get out ahead of it.

Do I care if species clause is changed? Not really. It probably doesn't affect me. But let's not pretend like people wanting more options in the builder for mons that are absolutely functionally different from each other are inherently making no points.

Gholdengo needs to be Gholdengone.

Here we go again.

This thing is an actual plague to any defensive builds, as its ability to prevent any viable removal outside of Cinderace, Maushold, and...
this guy => :weezing-galar: means that hazards are, in fact, staying up. One mon's metagame presence mandating that stall and fat run 6 boots or maybe 5 boots and a toxic orb is beyond metagame warping and honestly just this fact alone should warrant a ban. No mon in any metagame should force building mandates this heavily, but it doesn't stop there.

Not really. I run Corv all the time as a defogger, which gets wrecked by Ghold on paper, but in practice you just U-turn into something that threaten Ghold. This is like the only thing with removal in the tier Ghold really restricts. Just Corv. Nothing else. Not even most of the lower tier niche mons.Like all the spinners have a Fire or Ground move that can hit Ghold supereffectively. The rest like Ace bypass it directly. And if you force a Tera, then it can't spin block anymore. Maybe a balloon needs to be popped, but this is also clearly a one time thing.

As for boots spam, people were doing that on stall in gen 8 anyways. It's why people started using Blissey over Chansey again. Other than stall, you can build it so you don't need as many as 4-5 boots. I build all my balance teams and team in general to have anywhere from 0-2 boots. 2 boots max is my personal rule.

It spreads status with twave and breaks with Hex, it recovers off any damage when dealing with passive threats

You just listed 3 of 4 possible moves there. Like Gholds I run into lately usually run NP and Make It Rain with Shadow Ball because they can't fit all those moves on a single set. The T-Wave/Hex combo can be good on Ghold at the expense of other things, but Pult is the mon that is most known for Hex and status.

Even after you kill it, it's already likely done its job, easily ohkoing tusk with mir, or treads with +2 shadow ball. Once dhengo is gone, you're likely not getting another chance to spin, and if you're just running foggers, dhengo is never going to die because all it needs to do is come in on defog attempts.

I think you are assuming some bad gameplay here. What defoggers besides Corv is it coming in on? Why are you letting Ghold just come in for free without preemptively doubling or using a coverage move or doing anything else reasonable to try and counter it?

This mon is so constricting in every way possible and is beyond unhealthy in every sense of the word. PLEASE get this mon a supect test. thanks !!

Nah. The big 3 now are Darkrai, Kyurem, and Wellspring. I'll bet Ghold is not even top 5 consensus. You won't see a Ghold suspect anytime soon.
 
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Nah. The big 3 now are Darkrai, Kyurem, and Wellspring. I'll bet Ghold is not even top 5 consensus. You won't see a Ghold suspect anytime soon.

I think Ghold is a write-in, so I doubt it will see any tiering action. The 3 you mentioned are big, but I think you forgot Zamazenta which is also a controversial mon. It still make me confused as to why it's not immediately banned upon receiving Body Press.
 
Gholdengo is not gholdenghoing anywhere, at least for the forseeable future or unless an absolutely insane amount of writeups show up on the next survey. Its not even in the top 5 most talked about mons for a suspect right now, and the closest it ever got was right at the tail end of DLC1.

As has been pointed out, Gholdengo pretty much exclusively screws Corv as a remover.

Editing here since I don't want to make a one liner. Doesn't Talonflame actually find itself on some stall teams to reasonable success because of a winning matchup into Ghold?
 
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Not really. I run Corv all the time as a defogger, which gets wrecked by Ghold on paper, but in practice you just U-turn into something that threaten Ghold. This is like the only thing with removal in the tier Ghold really restricts. Just Corv. Nothing else. Not even most of the lower tier niche mons.Like all the spinners have a Fire or Ground move that can hit Ghold supereffectively. The rest like Ace bypass it directly. And if you force a Tera, then it can't spin block anymore. Maybe a balloon needs to be popped, but this is also clearly a one time thing.

completely bogus statement but i'll address what i can. corv on stall can't slot u-turn, nor can any idpress corv for that matter. thus it just becomes dead weight. also even if you u-turn, what do you accomplish? dengo has successfully blocked fog, and can switch out next turn. mission failed successfully.

Restricting corv is also by itself an issue, as stall and fat builds rely on the otherwise reliable removal defog provides, which gets completely shut down. I'm not arguing ghold is broken into whatever brainless ho everyone mains, i'm arguing it is incredibly restrictive into a longtime mainstay playstyle (stall) and that alone is banworthy.
 
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completely bogus statement but i'll address what i can. corv on stall can't slot u-turn, nor can any idpress corv for that matter. thus it just becomes dead weight. also even if you u-turn, what do you accomplish? dengo has successfully blocked fog, and can switch out next turn. mission failed succesfully.

Restricting corv is also by itself an issue, as stall and fat builds rely on the otherwise reliable removal defog provides, which gets completely shut down. I'm not arguing ghold is broken into whatever brainless ho everyone mains, i'm arguing it is incredibly restrictive into a longtime mainstay playstyle (stall) and that alone is banworthy.

First of all, it's not bogus that Ghold only counters Corv when it comes to removal. You can find a different mon for it. It's also not bogus that I use Corv as a defogger. I literally do it all the time. Don't try to tell me how I play. You won't get very far.

However, I don't really play stall much. So I don't want to speak too much for the stall players. But I do play balance, not just HO, and this can include some really bulky teams where Corv still works just fine. The thing is they usually have mons that can actually threaten something. Pure stall doesn't. Ok... So I guess if you are truly using pure stall, and not bulky balance or even semi-stall, the U-turn into something that threatens Ghold won't work because your momentum is inherently dead and nothing on stall directly threatens anything.

Unless some other stall player wants to correct me the other way, fine, I'll give you that pure stall might not be able to use Corv as a defogger so easily. I also don't really understand why you would run only an ID BP Corv on stall and not try to PP stall with Pressure, but fine. I'll defer to you since you play it more.

Your argument here is still invalid. Ursaluna completely dumps on stall and nobody gives a crap. A mon dumping on a single, very specific playstyle isn't reason to ban it. You need more than that. Most of what you argued in your last comment isn't really as impressive as you seemed to think.
 
Also, people keep bringing up Ogerpon. We banned only one of four Ogerpon forms so far. Although stacking the remaining 3 all on a single team sounds goofy, they are still functionally different mons from each other. Cornerstone has Sturdy and different typing from Wellspring. Grasspon fills an entirely different niche than both of them with the ability to boost its speed in exchange for worse coverage. They aren't the same mon just because they share part of the same name.
I want to bring up the case of the "in-universe unique" pokemon that can switch forms with an item. This includes Ogerpon, Necrozma, Dialga-Palkia-Giratina, and probably a few others I'm forgetting. Allowing multiple forms of those to be on the same team kind of... fundamentally breaks the fantasy of Pokemon battling to me, something about it just feels wrong. How did Ogerpon clone herself to put on several masks at once?

I acknowledge that this may just be me enjoying the roleplay aspect of battling more than average, and wonder if others also get 'bad vibes' from the concept of spamming the same legendary. It's also funny that I don't find it bizarre if the opposing trainer has a second copy of Ogerpon or whatever. So we would probably get used to the 'bad vibes' of same-side cloning legendaries given enough time. Food for thought.

Anyway, I want to do my part to try to end this tangent by saying that until the meta has a point where updating to include regional forms has a tangible meta impact, the rule is very unlikely to change regardless of arguments from symmetry or theory or low ladder fun or whatever. Just the realpolitik of Smogon. Species Clause reformists, I would wait for a better time to play your hand.
 
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