Early thoughts from watching a bunch:
- is the best Trick Room Pokemon ever and likely uncounterable to a broken degree. With Eject Pack Magearna and Chilly Reception Slowking-G, Trick Room is already more accessible than ever. Enter Ursaluna, who is a picture perfect abuser. It’s naturally very bulk, it has an incredibly spammable move, it’s able to practically ignore status, and it can opt to SD for some walls or break most things from the start.
- is outright stupid. It can be checked, it can be countered, and it is not the same offensive profile (or even close) to others being discussed now, but Dire Claw in such a fragile metagame state may not have a place. Way too much variance and no true way to circumvent it or enforce counterplay besides being fortunate.
- is probably broken. Not a huge shock, but BoltBeam with Tera and that much power is nuts when coming off of speed like that. Priority is awesome for it and a few things soft check, but hands are being simplified by these single interactions and that’s not very competitive or stimulating.
- is pulling the same stuff it did last generation, but with more openings due to Tera and arguably more possibilities. Mainly seeing the Stored Power sets now, but I imagine it can pull off a lot. It’s worth noting that it’s kinda needed for Chien-Pao now, who I’ll probably get to in a later post.