Voted 3 Garg / 4 Volc / 2 Shed (though I think there's an argument for putting all three at 5, which I'll elaborate on) and wrote the following in the "additional issues" section, figured I'd copy-paste it here to make it a bit more public. It's a fairly radical stance but this metagame is in need of radical change IMO.
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The wording "competitive and balanced" creates some weirdness in answering the second question. I think the current metagame is fairly "balanced" in terms of no Pokemon having an individually egregious power level, but looking at OST or SPL games or just high ladder experience, it's hard for me to say that the gameplay patterns that have happened are particularly "competitive". It feels like we're still going through the "every game has an attempted matchup fish" phase that usually dies off by week 2 of new-generation SPL.
From my perspective, the source of this problem is evident: Banning Tera abusers instead of Tera itself is just cutting off individual heads of the hydra. I understand the council doesn't want to resuspect Tera until there's major metagame shifts, but I think the slow suspect-by-suspect process has already shown its deficiency at handling the elephant in the room here. I think they should strongly consider either:
(1) an earlier-than-planned Tera resuspect, OR
(2) massive quickban waves of Tera abusers until the metagame is somewhat playable [i.e. chopping off multiple heads of the hydra at once]
The status quo feels like a compromise that doesn't actually solve any of the fundamental gameplay issues. Chien-Pao being banned obviously lowered the "power level" of the tier, but in terms of gameplay, it just made it even fishier — now rather than there being one "central wallbreaker" to prep around that had only two common Tera types, we instead see a half-dozen breakers each running a wide gamut of Tera types that one can't feasibly prep for. Chien-Pao had very few bad matchups, but also very few "insta-win" matchups (since good players could prepare for it without TOO much difficulty); good play could always beat it. Perhaps it's just a consequence of the post-Pao metagame being in the formative state, but it feels like currently, there's a lot more MUs where good play cannot surpass the matchup gap. [Add.: On review, I think my wording here makes it sound like the Chien-Pao ban was a mistake or something. No, obviously not; the meta becoming more MU-fishy was not a direct result of the Chien-Pao ban, but rather just a natural evolution given the metagame factors present. This isn't meant to be a defense of Pao lol.]
People propose banning Garganacl because of unhealthy effects in the teambuilder and whatnot, which is fair. However, Garg being able to select its Tera type makes it able to check essentially the entire tier depending on what the team needs — remove that aspect and I think you make prep even harder, not easier. Yes, I know this sounds like "broken-checks-broken" mentality, but when the people voted to keep Tera, that's (in a very literal sense) what they were consenting to, so like it or not, we have to tier with it in mind. This is actually why I voted Volcarona as more deserving of a ban than Garganacl — Volc is not as "busted" as Garg in a conventional sense, but (since the Chien-Pao ban) its impacts on the tier are almost purely negative. I still doubt a Volc ban would fix anything, but it probably wouldn't make anything worse.
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Addendum: Admittedly, this writeup does neglect to mention how matchup-fishy Garg can be as well; Vert mentions Curse Water Garg sweeps which definitely feel like they fall into that camp, especially since Block is a genuine threat at the moment rather than just a weird niche lure. A realization of my "aggressive quickbans" proposal would obviously have Garg included in the first wave, even if my vote of 3 isn't exactly "quickban tier"; I voted 3 under the current ban philosophy rather than the exceptional circumstance I proposed. If broad tiering strategy reconsideration is on the table, then I would vote a 5 on both Garg and Volc, and probably place Shed Tail somewhere from 3 to 5 after a lot of internal debate.
Also, on reflection, my phrasing sounded a tad harsh on the council here, but that was not at all my intention. Let me be clear: I genuinely think they've done a very good job with the (miserable) cards they've been dealt. I can confess that actually implementing either of the options I outline would obviously be wildly unpopular. When council said they wouldn't resuspect Tera until after HOME, that commitment made sense at the time (hell, an immediate resuspect would've made it seem like they were just trying to repeatedly suspect it until it finally got restricted — double jeopardy laws exist for a reason, after all). When council said they'd be shifting from quickbans to suspects, that commitment also made sense at the time (and though an exception was made for Espa, I doubt anyone's crying over demon bird getting special treatment given community consensus). I just wanted to put this opinion out there to at least get people thinking about what the consequence of continuing to feed the hydra while cutting off its heads one-by-one.
That all isn't to say that this isn't a serious proposal — these are my genuine thoughts — I just can see the obvious regarding the viability of said strategy. Smogon is based on a mixture of meritocratic leadership and semi-democratic proceduralism, after all, and it would probably be worse in the long term to go against those established processes by sidestepping the suspect process via continued quickbans or resuspecting Tera too quickly. And at the end of the day, I'm just some roomchat random who watches high level games while only really participating in ladder; it's oft said that players are good at identifying problems but not so good at fixing them, so radical solutions like this should absolutely be taken with a grain of salt when their consequences are potentially dire.
Alas, even if solutions aren't viable, the problem still exists, and I think we shouldn't neglect it from our conversations. Yes, it's annoying to hear people continue complaining about Tera months after its suspect ended when another suspect in the future is all-but-confirmed, but IMO it's better to be annoyed than complacent, lest we get a repeat of BW. (In fact, I would argue BW is an example of a metagame where players realized the one-by-one approach to fixing the tier wouldn't work, as evidenced by Keldeo's failed suspects... and though at the time I would've voted ban on Keld, in hindsight it does seem like the no-ban vote has been vindicated. That said, there's obviously a ton of differences between the metagames, so I don't want to hammer this point too much, since the comparison does collapse if you try to extend it beyond a broad philosophic parallelism.)