Short version at the end of the post. And sorry for the wall of text.
I'm gonna change the subject of the discussion because of my experience of laddering for the suspect (still doing that btw). As most of you know, low ladder is terrible in BH, with teams that run less than 6 mons, autowin with shed/imposter, monstrosities like Mray with haze/calm mind/sludge wave/clanging scales and we all know I can go on for a while.
But one thing emerged from that. Not mray, but spam teams. MMX, MMY, Mray, MMX + MMY being the most prominent ones, but other exists. The only time I faced Mray spam in the suspect, the Mrays where trash (z-conversion into electric, to say an example) but the others were just unacceptable on a "healthy metagame" basis. Now I'm quoting myself, and elaborating more (and better) since I'm no longer on a chat.
ElMustacho on the Discord said:
this suspect is being trash. 1/4 of matches so far are spam team, with mray nowhere to be seen while laddering. sure mray is broken, me not seeing it while laddering is irrelevant and wabba wabba whatever but you know also what? lack of species clause is straight overwhelmingly uncompetitive with
A) scouting heavily limited, also abusing the mechanic of naming everything with the same name
B) no skill really involved in teambuilding because you still have good results with no planning
C) not having imposterproof sets and still beating imposter should smell like decaying sewer rats (if someone thinks that the problem is how imp is played go on and show proof of that with replays and stuff)
D) nothing counters or checks every set of whatever species spam is used, rendering choice of walls irrelevant
E) this is also the new era of sash smash (dazzling sometimes) spam, and I don't remember the majority of players being happy about it
F) on the sash specifically you can't lay hazards and break them because 1 turn later everything is already snowballing and it's too late, also there's always a sash magic guard defogger so it's only a mild annoyance
G) fuck species spam
H) if you prepare for species spam you are not preparing realistically for everything else
I) literally the first point of the first post of the suspect thread, section clauses (quoting): "Dominant strategies with either no checks, or the player has to choose between preparing for this specific strategy or the general meta", you may not call it dominant right now but just read letter H again and you should see the problem
A) There are 6 Mray on team preview, what do you send out? If it's a wall, then good luck picking one that actually walls that specific Mray, because regenvest doesn't wall tc and fc doesn't wall specsburst. If it's an offensive answer then you are frail, and mray can fakespeed, live with sash and retaliate, or outspeed with scarf. If there was only one Mray, and you brought checks to most sets, chances are you won't get swept that easily. The same argument can be brought for MMY and MMX, with appropriate differences.
B) 6 MMX; 2 dazzling, 2 prankster, 1 magic guard, 1 -ate. That took 15 seconds to type, and it's basically no skill teambuilding. This is going to easily overwhelm most defensive cores.
C) In regarding to this imagine that most of the sets run shell smash + sash. Imp gets in for free on boosted M-something. If they also run spectral thief you can click x because there's nothing you can do then. If imp goes first, opponent lives it and kill with +4 vs -1 if they spectral, possibly super effective or deinvested, and outspeed anyway next turn. Or the opponent goes first (or lived your first hit bc of sash), and murders your imp (example for mmx,
+2 252 SpA Pixilate Mewtwo-Mega-X Boomburst vs. 252 HP / 252- SpD its imposter: 728-858 (103.4 - 121.8%) -- guaranteed OHKO, both have a smash under the belt), and it's snowball time. You can do this with most spam teams. Even MMY can do that:
+2 252 Atk Mewtwo-Mega-Y Spectral Thief vs. 252 HP / 0 Def (0 IV) its imposter: 710-836 (100.8 - 118.7%) -- guaranteed OHKO. For Mray, all you need is ice coverage, and hopefully you don't need a calc to believe that. And it doesn't even need to be the same mon, because the next mon has sash and does the same thing, or your imposter actually has 1 less speed than the next opponent so they can smash again and outspeed all the times, which leaves you with 1) imposter dies and snowball or 2) sack something then pray for speed tie, otherwise snowball. And the thing is repeatable. Prank haze you say? Overwhelmed or taunted.
D) Name one set that walls all mray, that walls all mmy or walls all mmx. I'll take this back if you do, but I also reserve the right to instead answer with a sightly modified common set that beats it, and I can afford to run it since I have another 5 back here.
E) If only we had an ability which ignored opponent items this wouldn't be a problem, but that's fantasy. No matter how strong you hit, how much you boosted or how frail the opponent is, it won't die to one hit. Given that multi hit moves are extremely unreliable (expected base power is 79, ranging from 50 to 125), they either aren't used or they are, but that brings us to H, which is for later. So the opponent never dies to one hit and can almost always reverse the situation, even in dire circumstances. Like opponent has 1000000 smashes under the belt, but you live 120000020 bp power trip on mmy and kill back. So nice.
F) Counterplay to sash is scarce but let's investigate further. Magic room (or wonder, not important)? Also stops your items, so no ph activation, no rocky helmets to catch contact shed, no googles for spore and so on. Knock off? Removes after the hit, and sash already did the job. Trick? Tricking faster stuff will make them boost AND faster/stronger, and if you are faster chances are they'll 2hko you. Hazards? Ok, who sets rocks on a smasher? Like why? It's a death wish. When they are not running mbounce, otherwise that goes from a death wish to a suicide wish. Pranksters are already strapped for moveslots and it's hard to find places for rocks, otherwise sure, that's reasonable, not like dark can prevent them. But let's say you somehow got rocks up, they'll have a magic guard user that is immune to OHKO because of said sash, and it defogs. And it still has offensive presence, because hjk, mind blown, light of ruin and stuff.
G) Self explanatory, but also irrelevant to discussion. Sorry not sorry about using strong language.
H) Ok you've had enough of species spam teams and decided to counter team them. You pick skill link to break sashes while ohkoing, but that doesn't stop mmx (no multi hit move can ohko it based on typing), and it may go down to prank dbond. So you run msab to wall mmx, but mmx runs pixi and it dies. You run cresselia, which walls mmy like a god, except when it runs smash and it coincidentally runs se coverage (
+2 252 Atk Mewtwo-Mega-Y Power Trip (140 BP) vs. 252 HP / 252+ Def Cresselia: 430-508 (96.8 - 114.4%) -- 81.3% chance to OHKO), so you run also unaware audino, since it walls power trip rather well, except when they run sunsteel, and photon isn't a good matchup anyway, and they might run sf sludge wave on something else which does a ton, so you run fc chansey, but psystrike hurts, and they can smash until they get past it by ohko, and so you run [...]. Now observe that all of this ends up quite subpar, and you can't reasonably bring anti species clause teams, or even specifically anti MMX spam (for example), without compromising the matchup with everything else. Your zygarde, mbro, msab, tina core may be optimal vs common and even most obscure sets of MMX, but Mray (and not just spam) sits on that.
I) Final point. This is why, for me, lack of species clause is worse than having mray in the meta. The real problem isn't that boomburst 2hkoes 90% of the meta, dragon ascent 2hkoes 85% of the meta, or +3 lorb owing outspeeds 95% of the meta and 2hkoes 60% of the meta, the problem is: it
can be something else. Your counter to boomburst isn't the counter to dragon ascent. And lets be real, it's not a big problem if you somehow know that mray is always something specific. We have pdon, but it can only run desoland no item, and while v-create is nigh unbeatable in power, it's not broken, because tina gets in knowing it walls and, well, it walls. The same would be true if mray was somehow limited to just 1 set. Limited to specs burst? Soundproof
something is usually good enough, if you know you won't get dragon ascended in the face. Band tc? Fc, problem solved. While this can cause some discussion (people never having a problem with triage because they run a lot of anti setup/priority means the "mray is broken" argument is 1/3 less effective against them, maybe below the line of banworthy), ray is still a lot to take in when teambuilding and playing, and we at least agree to acknowledge it. And lack of species clause is worse than that, because 6 same mons is likely to have 99+% 2hko chance vs
whatever single mon, and up to 3 mons considered together that percentage doesn't go down. A set (or couple) that breaks your defensive core deemed unbeatable to that specific threat exists. That's not a opinion, it does and that is. Your fc bro goes down to galva boomburst from mmx. Soundproof msab dies to lorb mg mmx. Cresselia doesn't survive smash trip from mmy. They are not the only set that beats the defensive wall. And while none of them are "the good ones", there's room for them in the spam species teams. But, to finally compare species spam thing with Mray;
Mray can be something else, species spam will be something else. And it will very likely and promptly beat you, even if you brought a supposed counter.
Seems like the concern is that we have rushed into suspecting Megaray based on.. how much time has passed since it was brought up? I don't know if I would use that as a real standard; how much discussion is enough before we move to the next step? What about Qb's or polls?
Well, traditionally, my view is to hold suspects when I feel that there is a level of consensus - which I accept can be somewhat vague. However, since Megaray, Shed and the others were brought up, I intentionally left the floor open to discuss any of them and it seems like there was more needed for Shed and the rest, but there wasn't much to add for or against MegaRay. What exactly would we then be waiting for?
After factoring in other things I've seen, ranging from agreements made for BH games in (imo) the most prestigious OM tour in OMPL, to other feedback I've received about how MegaRay "should've" been suspected a long time ago by various active players (some of whom have liked your post - mystifying to me if that means they agree..) to even insinuations that I personally don't want to suspect it for whatever reason, made me think it was a pretty straightforward move.
Having said that, if people think more time is required to discuss how to address it, I can consider rescinding the suspect and proceeding to a different one - I've never done that before and I would have to look into whether there's precedent for it, but I've always wanted the community to drive the decision making process.
Well also this. I think we lacked a final:"
Is this what you want to get suspected?". Not to say that mray doesn't deserve the suspect, nor that the idea just came up lately. But it feels like we missed the opportunity to correctly look at smash, bdrum, shed and lastly (and specifically, at least personally) species clause, and we instead went for mray. Even the discussion was lacking; from the "
hey we are thinking about the new suspect, what do you think" we had 3 weeks and 2 pages of discussions, most of those posts are indeed about Mray, but even then only a fraction are actually good posts; the majority of those posts are "that's not how ray works" for better or worse, bad post, or posts about something else that died in 2-3 answers, with the occasional reminder of avoiding posting without knowledge or proofs. The discussion, as a whole, was lacking, and by extension the decision was hustled. That is, in my opinion.
Short version; species clause before ray suspect, last year please.