Hey PU it's been more than a week after the bans. I'd like to bring up the possibility of a
Sneasel suspect test.
If you've played PU, you would know how much of a threat Sneasel is. It shreds apart teams without a counter because its speed, power and STABs are just godly. Of course, anything shreds apart teams without a counter, but Sneasel is different in a few ways:
1) It is difficult to check. Sneasel is one of the fastest unboosted mons in PU, so the only things that really revenge kill it on offense are Zebstrika (Ninjask gets sniped by Ice Shard) and Scarfers. The worse thing is that nothing that "checks" Sneasel can switch in at all. Zebstrika takes a huge beating from every move while Scarfers can never switch in because of Knock Off's spammability removing their scarf if they do so. This pretty much means that without a solid counter (I'll get to that soon) you're forced to maneuver your way around Sneasel's moves until you switch in a mon that can beat it or sac something with SR and revenge it so that it can't keep coming in.
2)
Sneasel restricts teambuilding. Sneasel only has 3 counters in PU: Poliwrath, Throh, and bulky Carracosta. As mentioned earlier, unless you want half your team dead by the time Sneasel dies, these are pretty much compulsory on every team. If you've tried building a good number of teams in PU, it's likely that you've encountered problems such as:
- I want to build around a Water-type, but Poliwrath and Carracosta share weaknesses... Hence I'm forced to use Throh or to be extra careful to not add any more weaknesses or it'll be difficult to play
- I want my glue to be a Sneasel counter that hits hard and fast, but Throh and Carracosta (and some Poliwrath) are slow... Hence I'm forced to use Rain Dance Poliwrath
If that wasn't clear enough, here it is worded differently: I don't want to have a Throh every time I build a team with a different Water-type. I don't want to use RD Wrath every time I need my team to be fast. I've even had times where I needed a glue mon to make myself slightly less weak to other threats, but was forced to use a Sneasel counter just for that purpose because being slightly weaker to those threats was better than being 6-0ed by Sneasel.
Sneasel suspect would be way less straightforward than anything we've had. Ask anyone who plays PU, myself included, and they'd tell you Sneasel is not broken, at least in the traditional sense, because its counters hard wall it and are everywhere right now. However, I believe teambuilding to be not fun when Sneasel is here and Sneasel has a negative impact on our tier.
If we could, a suspect test would be good to look at Sneasel's effect on the meta (if possible we could ban Sneasel from a suspect ladder to see how it affects teambuilding). Likewise if anyone is willing I can build non-Sneasel teams and battle to check it out. :)
Also
Anty wanted me to link this post from the OU suspect thread which y'all might want to read. It's relevant. :)
http://www.smogon.com/forums/thread...ssite-remains-ou.3529407/page-28#post-6058682