The point UltiMario was trying to make (which you completely ignored) was that the council members are wrong, not that the suspect test itself was not agreed upon by players (the council) that are clearly not as good at pokemon when compared to that of essentially every iteration of every other tier council ever.
Try harder lmao
So onward to good friend UltiMario's post:
I'll start with the note I kinda fell out of this meta after Mushy ban since I didn't like the meta changes, but before that I topped the ladder a few times and I think I have a few posts in one of these PU threads proving it. My look on the meta is gunna be a bit outdated but its probly still valid.
I've played a good number of tiers since I started playing in 2005, but out of every single tier I've ever played, and every single suspect I've seen, Garbodor might be one of the most hilariously poor suspect choices in the history of the game. Usually when there's a problematic Hazard Setter in a tier, it's usually for a few reasons, the most common of which are that it can block the Spinning/Defogging of its hazards or that the mon in question pushes the game into a direction where only 2 types of teams are very viable (one abusing that setter, one that counters that team type). Garbador not only does neither of those, but doesn't even get close. It's literally just the best Pokemon in the tier that learns Spikes, nothing more, nothing less. It doesn't cause unremovable hazards and it doesn't cause severe damage to the metagame that limits team choices. Banning it is no better than banning Spikes, and effectively, that's all it accomplishes, which is why I find it hilarious that when someone mentions banning Spikes they get met with incredible amounts of backlash when all banning Garbador does is get rid of a balanced mon from the meta that also happens to learn Spikes.
The Pokemon isn't even good because it's a high quality mon, it's good because the Spinners and Defoggers are low quality in the tier (and the funny part is that they're not even that bad, they're just about as good as Garbodor is on a base level if you discounted their Hazards/Spinning). While this is somewhat irrelevant, it's additionally an incredibly volatile to ban because if a good Spinner or Defogger happens to drop from NU... Garbodor's quality drops dramatically. That really says a lot about it: it doesn't have its own merits to warrant a ban, and it's frankly kind of a joke that its getting suspected to begin with.
How to: miss the point.
The first thing that went wrong in this post is that you admit that you haven't played the meta in a good while, and yet you do feel like you have sufficient metagame knowledge to judge whether the thing currently being suspected is broken. Well, ok, let's assume you do know what's up and that "I haven't played the meta for months" does not mean "I do not know the meta.
The second thing that went wrong here is that you are trying to compare different Pokemon that were suspected in different tiers to the suspect at hand. Let's, for example, take Froslass, which was banned from RU this gen for being able to keep its hazards up with ease and then taking something down with it with a bit of luck. True, Garbodor does not have a Ghost typing, it does not have Taunt and it does not have Destiny Bond, but you forget that
RU is not PU and the fact that their suspect has to meet these requirements to be broken on a support-based level does not mean that ours needs to meet the same criteria. Let's not forget that we don't have a whole lot of viable hazard removers (the only good offensive one is Swanna, for example) and that Garbodor is actually able to spin/defogblock if it wants to (Tbolt for Pelipper, Mantine and Swanna, Explosion for a one-time pseudo-spinblock, otherwise just slap a Misdreavus on your team to take care of Avalugg). It's also bulky, so it can actually set hazards multiple times during a battle rather than having one shot at it. Basically: don't try to compare this suspect to suspects in different tiers/different gens/with different factors that make it broken.
The third thing that went wrong here is that you went ahead and said that without Spikes Garbodor isn't good anymore. Well done champ! It's true! But the thing is, it does get Spikes! I could go ahead and ask "what if Froslass didn't learn Spikes?" and you'd answer that it'd drop to NU or PU because Spikes are its niche. Wouldn't Deoxys-D basically be a slightly worse Cresselia without access to its hazards? Wouldn't Scolipede have been fine in last gen's NU if it weren't for the fact that its access to Spikes + the awful spinners that resided in the tier made the entire tier centered around hazards? Isn't the same happening here? We can't compare Garbodor to other mons in other tiers by looking at their exact movepool and stats and going "but this thing's way worse", but we can draw a parallel between all these mons and Garbodor in the sense that if they lose their key move, they're suddenly not that scary anymore. And yet they were banned,
because they learned that one key move.
The fourth thing that went wrong is that you said that banning Garbodor is no different from banning Spikes, which I won't go into any further because Magnemite covered that part real horrorshow and the same sort of argument has been held many times before in different tiers and the result has always been the same: banning the move is not necessary unless it is broken on every legal mon in the tier that gets it. This is simply not the case, we do have
some hazard removers that suffice just fine and our other hazard setters are way worse than Garbodor. The only great Spikes setter I know of bar Garbodor is Roselia, which is a great mon but way less easy to fit on a team than Garbodor (which fits on every team pretty much) and a lot more predictable.
The final thing that went wrong is that you appear to think that if a mon is broken more due to the shape of the meta than because of its inherent qualities, it isn't actually broken, which is funny because when you suspect/ban something, you take a look at the way the Pokemon influences the entire tier rather than how it inherently can perform, because only in context does a ban make sense. Let's take BW2 NU again. Scolipede ended up being broken because the tier was shaped in such a way, that good hazard removal was hard to come by and therefore spikestacking HO had an inherent advantage over other playstyles. It wasn't broken in RU because in RU there were more spinners available. Suspect testing is almost entirely context. Your last point contributes nothing to the discussion and is also easily refuted by saying that if Kabutops or whatever would have dropped to NU last gen, Scolipede would have been fine and didn't have to be banned. If we ban it and the meta eventually shapes so that it becomes less friendly to it, then we retest it. If that doesn't happen, then good riddance.
I may not have convinced you that Garbodor is broken, but at the very least I have proven that Garbodor is not at all a ridiculous suspect candidate. Also, play the meta before posting thank you very much.
