Suspect SV Camomons Suspect Test: Porygon-Z

[Smallsmallrose]

CAMOMONS IS SUSPECTING PORYGON-Z!

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Following the Camomons Survey results (will be fully discussed on the Camomons thread soon) Porygon-Z was the Pokémon with the least amount of players stating it was completely balanced at a paltry 21.7% with more players wanting council action, and vast majority of you being indecisive. And after council discussion on the survey, we want to take advantage of the ladder while we still have it and give power to the players to suspect Porygon-Z!

According to the Camomons Survey, many players already believed Camo was in a relatively competitive, diverse, and enjoyable state with only few concerns being voiced, one of the loudest being about the powerful Porygon-Z. For the survey's duration, multiple players stated negative opinions on it in the text answers and it spent the duration of the survey being the pokemon with the most calls for council action, peaking at a walloping 40% call for action about halfway through the camo survey's duration. The council ultimately voted on whether we should take action on any of the elements mentioned in the Camomons Survey, and who if so. And we all agreed to suspect Porygon-Z

Porygon-Z is a monstrously powerful breaker, sporting a gigantic 135 base special attack, adaptability, and a movepool to give the adaptability boost to type combinations with near perfect coverage like

,

, or

though it usually sticks to

on the account of the incredible offensive synergy, as well as the fact that it can pick the ferocious adaptability blizzard over ice beam to take advantage of the free hail set by either Slowking as a teammate. It can break through teams combining these tools with multiple excellent options for it's sets. It can run a choice scarf or choice specs for even more speed or immediate power and the ability to invalidate passive Pokémon with trick. Or if it wants to keep the boots for longevity, it can instead set up nasty plot and/or agility to blast through defensive or fast offensive teams respectively. It can even occasionally use recover to increase it's own survivability and become extremely difficult to pepper down with the attacks of defensive Pokémon. Porygon-Z also notably hits some important speed benchmarks, outspeeding the incredibly common Great Tusk and everything slower and often using these slower Pokémon as an opportunity to apply it's offense and trap the opponent in difficult scenarios that result in KOs for the Porygon-Z user.

On the flipside, for all it's power, Porygon-Z sometimes has difficulty getting into the correct positions to apply it's power. It's bulk is just good enough to survive resisted hits and neutral hits from some defensive pokemon, but bigger hits are a bit much to ask, especially when it's preferred offensive combination of

isn't a cornerstone of defensive utility. This type also holds it back when it wants to be an immediate threat choice specs or choice scarf, giving it a weakness to stealth rock on top of it's already detrimental time switching into multiple stacks of spikes more than once. (And while rarer,

or

aren't much better off with the common weaknesses their secondary types bring.) And even if it gets into the right place at the right time, you aren't always threatening to immediately make progress on the opponent's team. Choiced sets can be slowed down by individual resists/immunities to it's dual type (In fact, the strongest special walls like Ting-Lu can handle the scarf set by themselves with little trouble.) And regenerator pokemon that are at least neutral to it's dual stab like certain Slowking variants or Assault Vest Cyclizar can always scout it's intentions to maximize the value of pokemon that individually take one of Porygon-Z's dual stabs. Non-choiced sets also find themselves needing the opportunity to set up nasty plot or agility, which can sometimes be too big an ask with the defensive struggles Porygon-Z's common dual types carry, and even if it clicks one, it can run into the situations where it wished it clicked the other boosting move, or even run into the situations where it wishes it had recover. Also while it hits some notable benchmarks like Great Tusk, its by no means the fastest threat without a choice scarf or an agility boost, leaving it open to being KOed by many of the faster offensive threats that populate the metagame.

The instructions to participate in this suspect are as follows:

• Create a new account on PS. You do not have to follow any specific naming convention, but your suspect account must have never played a game in SV Camomons before this suspect test went up or you will not receive valid requirements (resetting W-L does not count for this—the account you use must never have played Camomons before the test, full stop.)
  • You can use /rank to check if your alt is allowed to get requirements. Whenever in doubt, type /rank and it will tell confirm if you are eligible or not
• At any point on your new account, use the command /linksmogon on Pokemon Showdown! You will receive instructions on what to do once you run this command.
• Double check that you're listed as a voter here! If you aren't listed as a voter despite having valid reqs, please contact dhelmise, Giagantic, April, or any other OM Staff member.
• If you have any questions about this new process, feel free to PM dhelmise!

The requirement to vote in this suspect test is a COIL value of 2850 (with a B Value of 2). The deadline for getting requirements will be November 27, 2025 at 23:59 EDT.

 

[PrincessGardevoir]

Guess I'll be the first to comment, sure.

Get this thing outta here.
There's only a handful of extremely strong offensive or defensive mons that I'd consider overwhelming, and hits the benchmark with flying colors. It's the face of Webs offense and benefits from so many of the best mons having typings it can take advantage of, from common , , , and variants, get in, and start wrecking havoc. I've been spectating about as much, if not more, than I've been playing, and while

is absolutely the most common, I've seen

used with Glowking support for both the 50% defense boost, Blizzard's accuracy, and being a spinblocker to boot, and

once. Not that that one did anything, but it's definitely not shoehorned into just running Electric, which frees it from an Earthquake weakness, and gaining access to switchins against Body Press users is incredible.

Double Dancer P-Z, while it technically will basically never get its boosts up safely curtsy of its middling bulk, with Webs down it goes from needing to get in on something as passive as Alomomola safely to choose one to only needing to click Nasty Plot. While running Agility might be redundant, it improves the matchup against very strong hazard removal such as

Great Tusk or pretty much any variant of Terapagos, with Defog being quite rare.

On the flipside, for all it's power, Porygon-Z sometimes has difficulty getting into the correct positions to apply it's power

And on this note, getting it in is remarkably easy, thanks to the pivot Regenerator blobs of and , the former giving Blizzard free reign and the defense boost, while the latter can restore a Specs P-Z's health back to full, where it's able to tank another neutral hit just fine, or Boots P-Z back to full, where it can pick whatever boost is necessary for the situation at hand. Switching it in raw can be a lot more dicey without giving up the Ice typing, so you have at least some good resists to work with.

There's a handful of adaptations I've seen on ladder, like

mons including and a handful of

variants of , both of which can help slow down Porygon-Z, or an influx of Stall which can handle Specs sets (then lose to Nasty Plot), and the presence of very strong priority like 's Bullet Punch or the handful of ESpeeders can stop it if P-Z gets chipped slightly, but I just see no value in keeping this little goober around. It provides no defensive utility and it serves to make a pretty good archetype, Webs, much better, and hurts bulkier structures who have to carry one or two answers to it, and keep them at very high health for most of the game.




....I also just really dislike P-Z in camo. No fun trying to play around NP sets when Scarf Trick jumpscare.

 

[Siamato]

16 - 1 reqs. Dropped one over four or five games against the sun player spammer and played one more cuz I didn't see I already had reqs. Continued my run until I reached more than 3000 coil.

Leaning DNB on PZ.

Don't get me wrong, this mon really is a beast when it comes to breaking. However, like Smallsmallrose stated in her post, PZ feels balanced being a high reward high risk mon.

In the builder, the Specs set doesn't feel much more restrictive than things like Latios or Pult tbh. Ting-Lu can still scout (more easily if it resists Ice cuz if PZ locks itself into Tbolt you can just go any Ground), Gking too, RegenVest like Cyclizar, Reuniclus and

Fairy Mola, Hoopa-AV avoids 2HKO and supported by Wish Mola it's a decent counterplay. People found new ways to deal with it with stuff like

AV Crown but, tbh, you don't need such a thing to be "fine" against it.

Overall, it feels like there is enough counterplay to PZ without ressorting to very unusual stuff (what would be a proof it should go due to being too restrictive), though not perfect for sure. PZ will punish playing too passively but will struggle against layered counterplay or more offensive teams. Supporting PZ with Sticky is a good idea but Sticky is more of a ladder kink than a real and consistent playstyle giving the prevalence of Levi mons like Latis or Hydrei or boots stuff like Pult, Deo-S, Cind, Valiant, AoA Zama, fast Zapdos, etc.

Scarf is perfectly fine imo cuz it doesn't break much anymore while having the issue of not pivoting for a Scarf mon and suffering hazards a lot.

Double dance is scary but honestly if you manage to setup those 2 then you may just deserve to win lol.

Banning PZ will just result in more Latios which is probably harder to answer overall tbh. What I mean by this is that Latios has much more set variety than PZ while definitely having less flaws abusing good defensive and offensive types, being immune to grounded hazards and having access to Recover with quite okay bulk for an offensive mon. Latios could even replicate PZ's set while finding more opportunities at the cost of hitting about 35% less harder (which is a significant drop don't get me wrong).

For the reccord, PZ was also free last gen and there was, in fact, probably less counterplay than what we have now. The gen was however more offensive making it harder to get in.

Some replays I found:

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen9camomons-2482878010-unmtlwyi7v3fgh3kcbh8w0grjif5fi7pw
PZ is nothing into boots spam with layered counterplay (neutral Gking + double Ice resist + Ground)
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen9camomons-2478074407-2w9nmgfnt9abndjes4xdiuolbii47e9pw
The PZ team won but not alone. It did well here cuz Clas didn't have any Ice resist which is a mistake imo.
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen9camomons-888266
Jb managed to get away with the Hoopa-U AV + Mola Wish core I was talking about, even against Blizzard PZ into a slow team giving it a lot of opportunities.