Just commenting a bit. The Roost discussion is utterly pointless. OF COURSE, GF could make a pure flying type if they wanted. Roost is just a strong pointer that they, too, think of Flying as a "secondary typing" and thus do not want to make a pure flying type.
Also...
Mario With Lasers said:
Fire-types would be useless against Ho-oh, at best you'd see a spike in Heatran usage (unless you want to try to wall Ho-oh with lol Ninetales). And the current OU Grass-types are at 18th, 24th and 44th, while the two Ice-types we have are at 36th and 40th. It's not because "someone wanted it like this", but because... they're more used than the Ice-types. I mean, were the threshold higher, there would not even be any Ice-types in OU, just to show how poorly they are used.
Did you seriously not think of Ho-oh being somewhere in the Top 5 in OU? Wtf? OF COURSE, nobody wants to wall Ho-oh with Fire types, but everybody wants to USE HO-OH. And considered that we have 2 Fire types right nowin OU, adding a third one that is surely going HIGH in usage is a dramatic increase of Fire types.
And as I mentioned before...*sigh*
18 is just the strange effect of the move spore (but yeah, ok),
44 I forgot (but whatever, I mean 44!?)
and 24 is just even allowed to exist there because "somebody wanted this", this somebody being whoever the fuck arranged Smogon tiers.
I'm not arguing that Celebi should be banned (although I'm really in favor of Nintendo's banlist), but just that it is a good example: The Grass type seems to be actually so bad that a pokemon designed as a uber becomes no real problem to OU when it has the Grass type. See?
You cannot say, "Oh, there's Celebi, Grass isn't weak!" because the only reason there is Celebi in the first place, is because Grass is weak.
Efemera said:
Really now? The "obvious banlist" isn't well-designed. Jirachi gets banned because it's an event Pokemon and Garchomp is allowed. You really think an arbitrary banlist by Nintendo beats one tested by thousands of people battling all the time?
The tiers below OU exist for organization purposes, and so that you can play competitively with weaker Pokemon. How is that bad?
Anyway, Grass is a much better type than Ice. It resists both Water and Ground, the two most commonly used offensive types in the game, as well as Electric (and itself). Grass is mostly hampered by the fact that both Dragon and Steel resist it. Down in UU, Grass is very powerful offensively. Ice is just a terrible type. Most Water types learn Ice Beam, and Ice STAB isn't usually worth the huge number of weaknesses that come with Ice.
There are multiple things wrong with the first paragraph. I'm trying not to get into theory too much...
1. The "obvious banlist" does not need to be well-designed by anybody's means. The metagame adjusts. Imagine, you could even play pokemon when Garchomp was still allowed. It was an arbitrary decision that Smogon did not want a metagame centralized around Garchomp. People tend to think that this is natural, but you have to realize that Smogon nonetheless wanted the metagame to be centralized around Stealth Rocks and Scizor ('s Bullet Punch). Former metagames had that, too. GSC was almost completely centralizede around Blissey and Curse. It is an more or less arbitrary decision not to play a metagame centralized around garchomp. And as such not even less arbitrary than what Nintendo calls Uber.
2. The banlist isn't tested by shit. As I've said, you can play any game of pokemon in some way. It's not a great achievement that a metagame develops. Smogon uses a really poor method to decide on its bans (banning pokemon one-by-one, not re-testing everything once something changes, etc...) I know, they cannot do much better having only as many people as they have. But nobody should say they're doing better than they possibly could be doing. lol
I agree with you, that on paper it has some good defensive matchups. BUt if you look at it, there is no standard pokemon to make use of this (we had to invite celebi from ubers). Venusaur is the first defensive Grass type in OU (besides Celebi) and lurks at 77. It's somehow not working for Grass. (The reason you've given is IMO right, too. Perhaps we finally get a Grass/Steel?)
Tortferngatr said:
Because a bunch of people wanted to use Celebi but not Abomasnow. Not because ""somebody wanted them there." Celebi may also have seven weaknesses, but it has much better stats, complements Heatran perfectly, has a better movepool, and it's versatile. And it's fast. Abomasnow does not have good stats, it does not complement another OU perfectly, it tends to have a poorer, outclassed movepool, and it is not versatile. To top this all off...outside of Ice Shard (Weavile and Mamo pull this off better anyway,) it is slow. Hail is the only thing he's got.
Please see above... I'm not talkign about why Celebi isn't UU but about why Celebi isn't Uber. And that's because "some people" decided it should not be. And that's because it wasn't too strong for OU. And that's because the Grass type sucks.
@ UltiMario (below)
Doesn't affect my point. Of course, no type is so bad that you cannot make one of its pokemon uber.
