charizard-x is a pokemon that has been just plain great since being added in x/y. it has amazing typing for handling a bunch of annoying stuff, great coverage, a great ability, and the movepool and stats to abuse these things. it's really as simple as that. some of the things zard-x checks like certain steels & speedy electrics are things that have been around for a long time as well. my main point here is that it's consistently done the same stuff (for the most part) for awhile now... not much has changed.
i know we got rid of the definitions for an S rank pokemon, but i think this nom is more focused on if zard-x ever fit that standard than meta changes. of course, some things like the rise in usage of ground types that can counter / check zard is noteworthy, but these things have been around... we're just seeing a bit more of them now. mega sableye's kinda on the verge of dropping due in part to the STAG (goth) ban, and that kinda lowers the relevancy of zard a
teeny bit, but it's not a point worth arguing. other than that, the main big change as of recently is the decline in usage of mega altaria, something that totally counters all of zard's sets except iron tail if you're running heal bell / refresh / specially offensive. my point is, there haven't been any drastic changes to necessarily warrant a drop, and the negative changes that have happened are balanced out by the positive ones.
with that said, i want to go back to my first point in the above paragraph: does zard fit the S rank standards regardless of positive / negative metagame standards or not? i'm not trying to bring a definition into the argument here, but objectively speaking, an S rank pokemon should be a dominant pokemon that is doing something in every game you take it to... even if you take it to a game where the person has 6 deliberate counters, that just proves it pressured them during teambuilding. zard-x is definitely doing quite a bit each game, and it's capable of pressuring teambuilding for sure, but all of this is at the cost of major required team support. regular charizard is one of the worst pre-megas in the tier. it's frail and 4x weak to rocks, making it kinda difficult to bring in. someone's gonna try to argue that this can be applied to any pokemon 4x weak to rocks (focusing on talonflame here), but talon, for example, doesn't have a hard time switching into stuff, and it doesn't take up a mega slot, opening up your mega slot to allow more freedom when building & leading to you having an easier way of mitigating that rocks weakness. i only use talonflame here because it's in A+ and has the same typing as pre-mega zard.
so basically, zard-x is this super powerful and threatening pokemon that has been a consistently great force in the meta for god knows how long now, but at the same time, it requires a lot of team support in mandatory hazard removal (that you have to keep safe for zard) & means of bringing it in. couldn't you say that any pokemon that can set up and sweep like this would be super powerful and threatening with a bunch of team support? a good way to put it is that i've never found myself putting zard-x on a team after i already have what i'm building around and all that, but with every other S rank (and torn-t), i'm not just building my team
around them... zard-x almost
has to be built around; the few times i've added it in after have been happy coincidences where the stars just aligned. i'm not saying that an S rank pokemon has to be a "glue" pokemon, but rather, they're something that can fit on a wide variety of teams, and at the same time put in major work each game without much support.
i touched on the question of if S rank standards should be changed or not, and there was some commentary on that (
Albacore mentioned it in his post iirc). if the council decides to change the standards of S rank, i definitely think zard-x should stay, but ignoring that hypothetical, it should
drop to A+.