I’ve avoided posting about it, but I’m really not in favor of a Tera Blast ban and never have been. This isn’t to say that I think it’s a terrible idea or that it would ruin the tier or anything like that, hell I can see the arguments in its favor as to why it might technically make the tier better, but I think it’s a high-collateral ban that doesn’t really solve or particularly help a lot of people’s underlying issues with the tier that I think some people push mainly to get certain abusers potentially unbanned. Volcarona and Regieleki are the two most commonly cited, but Volcarona is not remotely reliant on the move except to hit Moltres and Heatran, the latter of whose usage has completely fallen off a cliff, and Regieleki doesn’t stand a ghost of a chance of fixing gen 9’s “hazard problem” considering its viability would be extremely fringe at best and its matchups into two of our 3 best Spike setters, Gliscor and Ting-Lu, would be absolutely abysmal. People rarely bring up Espathra when talking about unbanning Tera Blast abusers, and I think that’s because there isn’t much of a case to be made that unbanning it would “help the tier” in any way, which is what the push for banning Tera Blast is based on. Of course, the stronger argument is the idea that Tera Blast is a bit uncompetitive because it gives every Pokémon a tool to be extremely matchup-swingy in a way that even base Terastalization doesn’t accomplish, which while technically true on a surface level doesn’t account for a lot of different factors. It’s already been discussed how a lot of Pokémon just use Tera Blast to round out holes in their coverage for their standard sets rather than using the move as a lure to handle specific checks, so you’re really only talking about Pokémon like Kingambit and Roaring Moon in terms of the move being outright “uncompetitive”, and at this point we have split so many hairs in terms of trying to illustrate the move’s uncompetitive impact that you could use similar grounds to justify the uncompetitiveness of other moves not currently in the discussion. For example, suddenly the Stored Power argument from earlier this gen gets a lot more validity; should we ban that to retest Espathra and Magearna? That move doesn’t add anything constructive to the metagame and is extremely matchup fishy by nature as well, and would have significantly less collateral damage, but no one really talks about it any more.
TL;DR pushing for a Tera Blast ban mostly seems to equate to saying “let’s ban a high opportunity cost no RNG move that a large amount of Pokémon use healthily across multiple tiers as a coverage option because Kingambit and a couple other Pokémon can sometimes be matchup fishy with it and also maybe we can unban Volcarona if we’re lucky and it’s not still broken” and that’s just… not a very strong argument to me. It feels like it’s a kind of desperate attempt to push for change in the tier that technically might move OU in a better direction because yes Kingambit and Moon and Iron Moth would arguably be healthier presences without it, but that change will not really fix people’s problems with the tier, and even if no tier is gonna be upended by Sandy Shocks not having TB Ice, it’s still pointless collateral. I’d rather push for a substantial healthy change, like a Kyurem ban. Please, please just ban Kyurem instead.
TL;DR pushing for a Tera Blast ban mostly seems to equate to saying “let’s ban a high opportunity cost no RNG move that a large amount of Pokémon use healthily across multiple tiers as a coverage option because Kingambit and a couple other Pokémon can sometimes be matchup fishy with it and also maybe we can unban Volcarona if we’re lucky and it’s not still broken” and that’s just… not a very strong argument to me. It feels like it’s a kind of desperate attempt to push for change in the tier that technically might move OU in a better direction because yes Kingambit and Moon and Iron Moth would arguably be healthier presences without it, but that change will not really fix people’s problems with the tier, and even if no tier is gonna be upended by Sandy Shocks not having TB Ice, it’s still pointless collateral. I’d rather push for a substantial healthy change, like a Kyurem ban. Please, please just ban Kyurem instead.
