Also, I don't see any mention of Flower Veil for 25g. It's exclusively used as doubles ability due to its fickle effect condition so it's rather unexplored, but seems to be pretty strong and worth exploring imo.
You're kidding right?
I want to address the challenge we are dealing with here: Making a grass-type starter viable in CAP/OU. This is no easy feat. We can't be afraid of making something too strong... that should actually be our goal. CAP is full of OU legendaries, Ultra Beasts, and CAP-psuedo-legendaries with amazing stats and enormous movepools that a regular starter can't hope to compete with. Just look at Serperior, it is a very fast mon with one of the most broken ability/movepool combinations in the game. But even in regular OU Serperior is often only BL nowadays, and in the CAP metagame it is virtually unseen. This means we are going to have to really make these starters pretty broken in order to make them viable.
If we are talking about abilities with power: Grass Electric have significant sustain which gives greater credence to abilities like Water Compaction and/or Stamina. Combined with the limited stat spread both of these come in absolute wonders: we can mitigate low defense and completely sack attack to switch into Scalds without fear for the former, and allow free reign in items with Leftovers, AV, Choice Specs/Scarf, Life Orb, and have some significant welly in the offense department, and provoding perfect bait for Tomohawk: Tomo has to come in a Haze away to prevent a Snowball especially in the case of Stamina, but then has to eat a STAB electric attack.
While I understand your reasoning a bit more... neither of these abilities is strong enough to accomplish our goals. There is a reason not a single Pokemon has a viable set with Amnesia or Acid Armor: defensive stat boosting just isn't that good. So we switch CAP25g into a Scald, potentially get burned, get a boost to our Defense via one of the above abilities, and then what? We are still vulnerable to Ice Beam, Bug Buzz, Hurricane, etc. They can still switch in Plasmanta or Mega Venusaur on us and have a field day. We'd just get forced out and have absolutely no way to capitalize on those Defense boosts.
Let me reiterate. If we want CAP 25g to be viable in the CAP/OU metagame, we have to be prepared to go further than they did with Serperior. Situational defensive stat boosts just aren't going to cut it. Right now my top 3 choices for CAP 25g are, in order of preference:
1) No Guard
2) Prankster
3) Triage (I'm less inclined toward this one because it seems more appropriate on a revenge killing wincon or set-up sweeper than on some sort of specialist... but I can't deny that it has potential)
Last edited: