new slate!!!! here's my thoughts
Can we please not do this to ourselves again? It's proved itself over and over again to be able to adapt to and jank past every single check we've thrown at it. Sub, SD, and any combination of Hands' massive amount of coverage, alongside recovery through Drain Punch that accentuates its already high bulk, are just too much for the tier to reliably handle. Even when burned, it still manages to be effective thanks to all of the aforementioned qualities. Sure, you do slow it down a little, and yes, poisoning it (which is, admittedly, much easier now thanks to the Three) does serve as an effective method of putting it on a timer. However, even then, there is no surefire method that will ensure you are prepared for Hands. The requirements to deal with each set vary just enough that instead of "Am I prepared for Iron Hands?", the question you have to ask, both in the builder and in play, is "Am I prepared for
this Iron Hands?". The answer being a confident yes for every single set is so, so rare. I've genuinely lost count of the amount of games I've seen where someone has loaded upwards of three checks, and Hands has managed to jank past
all of them. It's fat enough and strong enough to deal with the things that want to offensively check it (compounded by our lack of offensive Psychics and Fairies, as well as our offensive Grounds losing to it 1v1 after the loss of Garchomp), and Sub and SD are more than capable of taking advantage of the passive, bulky mons that aim to wall or status it. I haven't even gotten into how well it makes use of Tera, but it does, having several viable types to take advantage of (Ghost, Fairy, Fire, and Flying come to mind just off the top of my head). Please, for the love of god, ban it.
Genuinely really torn on this one, I've seen a lot of arguments from both ends that are very convincing. I was pretty anti-ban last time around, and I do still agree with a lot of the points Lily made in her post defending it, but
man this fucker is just really unfun to see and even less fun to actively deal with. I firmly do agree that, at least until it starts setting up, it's not at all difficult to switch into. The real issue that I'm having, however, is managing to
stay in on it and effectively pressure it. I think the argument of "just run Covert Cloak!" is really disingenuous and only manages to sidestep the actual problem. Not getting to run Boots sucks, but the real issue is that Garg's presence (and NOTHING ELSE may I add) forces several fat staples to run a suboptimal item just to not get dunked. This is also very heavily accentuated by the comically large amount of Knock Off users in the tier at the moment, most of which are good AND can reasonably be paired with Garg. I also don't believe that Garg suffers from Knock as much as some people say it does, losing your Leftovers or Boots or whatever sucks but hard recovery and a status immunity make it a lot easier to cope with. I think in general, Regenerator spam and particularly Amoonguss are decent at handling it. Grass Knot sucks though, don't think it's better than Giga Drain in a world where the Garg is likely going to be Tera-ing anyways and your first directive is likely going to be hitting the Clear Smog button to get rid of the +6 Defense it's managed to accumulate. I will also admit that Garganacl does present some unique challenges in the builder: it's a notorious Tera hog, isn't always an immediate threat without some prior setup, and struggles to run all of the moves it wants even if it's pretty much Salt Cure + 3. I'd probably lean towards a ban, if not just to stabilize the meta for the time being, but I'm genuinely really unsure how I feel about it at the moment.
I dunno, it's good but I still haven't seen it do anything I'd qualify as absurd. Could be due to being underexplored? Sp.Def Tran is as good as it ever was, and offensive variants struggle with being slow at times but are excellent into balance and other fat structures. I think Magma Storm's general unreliability is what keeps it tame enough for me to see it staying, as while 75% isn't the worst gamble ever, the risk you take is heavily accentuated by the fact that most of the things Heatran would miss Magma Storm on are more than capable of punishing you heavily. It's also another Tera hog since that's a huge factor in it being able to jank its way through a lot of unfavorable matchups, which can make it hard to build with at times (the only reason I haven't built GyaraTran :< ). Still an easy DNB for me.
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used Knock Off! 
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