Finished my reqs
This took me a lot longer than I thought and part of the reason why was because I thought it would be fun to use Yaichu to do the reqs. However, the more I use it, the more I am of the opinion that it's really not as good as people suggest and I ended up dropping it. If you look at the teams people used for reqs, you see a surprisingly little amount of Yaichu and usage is low in general, for good reason imo.
This is the team I used for reqs afterwards:
https://pokepast.es/d956505178815a34
What does Chu do? Well, chu is a fast and frail Wallbreaker. It struggles to switch in, gets revenged very easily, but is also hard to switch into.
Before discussing Yaichu though, let's talk about the teams it's used on. Yaichu *needs* slow pivoting to actually get on the field, making Glowking a crucial partner. If you continue building, you will usually end up with a Big 4 style team. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I haven't seen a major Yaichu team that isn't Big 4. For the 6th slot, you either see a defensive mon like Clef on Dugtrio Yaichu, or something with Offensive synergy and pivoting like Meowsc and draga.
Why does this matter? I want to call attention towards 2 major weaknesses of Chu teams.
Defensive Chu teams, where the 6th slot is a defensive mon, struggle to break through the opposing team once Chu is dead. This puts a *lot* of pressure on the Chu to stay alive. You have to switch out of many mons just in case they have scarf to scout them, need to be really careful with prio, etc. But most importantly, it's really risky to go for predictions, if the mon in front of you can kill you if you make the wrong move. If you have Chu in against a 30% chomp with a set running just Zap and Focus as an example, there is a lot of pressure on the Chu player to click Focus, which the opponent can use to switch into a ghost type, or Glowking to heal it back up. Defensive Chu teams just crumble if Chu is gone and can't really afford to consistently make risky predictions with it, which makes it a lot easier to handle.
For that reason, defensive Chu teams also kind of *have* to run Sub, because without Sub it's really risky to actually predict, limiting the coverage to just Blast and allowing many grounds to tank 2 hits.
Unless you drop Volt Switch, but without Volt Switch Glowking takes a lot less damage on each switch in.
Summary: Defensive chu teams have a lot of pressure on Chu to stay alive, which limits it's predictions and moveset, making it hard to break through quickly
Now offensive Chu team: These usually try to form a VoltTurn combo and they are absolutely broken against anything without an electric immunity, but most teams *do* have one. They struggle against dark types and have a really hard time to switch into chomp, which is a big Problem since scarf Hamu (or Gambit when lacking sub) like to come in on Chu, just like Chomp. I mentioned above that you kind of have to run Sub and this is another reason, being this Sucker weak on a team that cannot repeatedly switch into dark types sucks.
In my experience, Chu takes too long to get going and in the meantime, your opponent has many ways to just deal big blows to your team.
Basically, Chu teams either go defensive and make it easier to deal with Chu due to the pressure on it to survive, or they go offensive and often falls victim to getting out offensed by the opposing team.
Not everyone who thinks Yaichu is banworthy even thinks it's all that good though:
People who are voting to ban mainly make the argument that Yaichu is banworthy, due to the difficulty to switch into it safely. I disagree:
Every style of team has options that can switch into it safely at least once.
HO has Rilla, BO and Balance have G-Slowking, Stall has all kind of stuff to deal with it. Most well build teams naturally have something that acts as a 1 time guaranteed Chu check.
A big misunderstanding I am seeing is that people think you need to be able to come in against Chu safely *repeatedly* and yes, most teams can't do that. But you don't need Stall it out forever on an offense team, all you need to do is check it 1-2 times to give the rest of your team time to out offense your opponent.
Yes, if you want to check it repeatedly, then it becomes very prediction oriented. But if you need to switch into Yaichu multiple times throughout the battle, you are most likely doing something wrong.
Now I am probably hearing people arguing that slow pivots allow it to get in repeatedly safely, but you can easily avoid that by just switching into something that Chu doesn't like to come in against if your opponent has a slow pivot on the field. Sure, you cannot avoid it from switching in at all, but you can make it really difficult for Chu to come in with careful positioning and just expecting the pivot and then Chu to come out already.
Even teams that don't have dedicated Chu awnsers usually find ways to play around it. I ran a Stall team without ground and dealt with it by burning it with Scov and the stalling it out with protect spam, rocks and sitrus Glowking.
There was this stall team that was quite weak to Chu that simply ran protect corv and Wacan Toxa to stall out Zap Cannon PP. I've also build a psychic terrain HO team where nothing can switch into Chu, but it doesn't matter since nothing lets it come in either, because everything on the team is either faster or bulky enough to survive 1 hit.
What I am trying to say is, Chu *is* really hard to switch into, but in practise, this mon is far more manageable than many other threats in this format.
These are my arguments why Chu should not be banned. It's frail, takes too long to get going and teams build around it are often weak to the threats it invites in, making it easy to out offense it.
Now there are a few arguments in favour of banning it:
1: Set variety. With sub, volt switch, Nasty, all kinds of coverage moves, etc. It's hard to always make the right play. Pivoting around can get punished hardly by Nasty + Sub sets. As I mentioned above, Chu only has very limited safe switchins in most teams and getting those ruined by a surprise set can be devastating and overwhelming.
2: Full Para. A large part of my argument is me saying that most teams have at least 1 one time safe switch in. This is not true if you get full parad. Luckily full para is only 12.5%, but getting full parad on the Chilly reception out and inviting a Hamu or Chompnis for free is something really hard to recover from. It's unlikely, but the fact that the few safe switchins it does have can just gets haxed through with luck is a very uncomortetive aspect of Chu.
Due to this, I am kind of torn apart between wanting to ban it and not. I never feel like it's that much of a problem and don't even think it's nearly as good as people say it is personally, but Chu also doesn't really offer anything for this Meta game either and banning it feels like just getting rid of a way you can get haxed through even when you played correctly.
I am also annoyed by how much attention this thing gets, when other threats feel a lot more broken than it does.
For now, I am saying DNB. But if this thing keeps getting attention like it does now, I could see myself to just want to get rid of it.
- stall
- webs
, a Choice Scarfer, or a faster mega, of which there are many choices.
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, and maybe 
, uhhhhhh,
if they dont have Alluring Voice? Yeah "Unwallable" isn't much of an Exageration
, 
Mega Raichu-Y
will also probably improve Raichu’s chances to remain legal.
