Metagame SV Ubers UU Metagame Discussion (Spectrier Ban @ Post 702)

[Celeste]

No one is free from my haterdom and since I have some points i want to make about the analysis done here i wanted to reply to Finchely's post since i do disagree that Roaring Moon isn't broken and don't think this post goes about proving that effectively for a few reasons

spoiler so you can scroll easy

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen9ubersuu-829141
A bit of a joke game I'll admit, Medeia wasn't running a very good moon set. But neither was Ewin using a very good screens team either. Regardless, it demonstrates how the presence of screens makes it harder for Moon to get prolonged value, when it can't OHKO its opponents, and its opponents are capable of OHKOing it.

I think calling this a joke game when the team medeia loaded was used in a few other things around that time (i know for a fact i saw it more then twice in tour games around that time) thats while a bit unusual for the time a fine H/O chomp lead team and ewin is using a cheese structure that also wasn't unheard of is a bit disingenuous, plus the Roaring Moon itself was the turning point in medeia pulling out the win in the end since Ewin got the predict for the tera wrong. Throughout this post you have a bit of a habit of flip flopping between Roaring Moon having a few pivotal turns vs sweeping is a positive or negative (or saying "it struggles into offensive pressure" which is arguably true of every single H/O staple in this tier) but this game is the most egregious example since the Roaring Moon both ended a certainly game winning sweep from Volc, but forced the Gouging into losing the momentum it gets by being behind screens to kill the moon itself since the game is over on the spot if it doesn't. This interaction ends up giving Medeia a really advantageous position that would have been impossible without the Roaring Moon. Using this as an example as to why "roaring moon isn't broken because it didn't sweep here" is a poor analysis of how Roaring Moon did impact the game and more importantly gave Medeia a pretty consistent wincon.

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen9ubersuu-831156
After Medeia's Poisonceus dies to Lando, Celeste elects to go to Spectrier instead of Moon, because of how Spectrier is far more immediately threatening with Grimm Neigh, and also because Moon's bulk/ability to set up and survive espeed are significantly compromised by the presence of 3 layers. Medeia's Moon never even gets the chance to set up, because Celeste's HO was putting out constant pressure. Both moons this game died without getting particular value for themselves

I went spectrier because it objectively had a better matchup into a weakened Lando that Roaring Moon can't setup against. The intent was to break with spectrier for a simple roaring moon endgame, and Spectrier having an incredibly strong position does not make any argument in regards to roaring moons broken/healthy-ness.

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen9ubersuu-832479
This is another game where Moon put in really good work, but ultimately was able to be stuffed out by Mimikyu - a Pokemon commonly found on HOs these days. Even for non-wisp variations of Mmq, Play Rough into Shadow Sneak is guranteed to put Roaring Moon into Arceus Extreme Speed range.

I'm unsure of how this point specifically relates to roaring moon as it is applicable to any H/O mon in the tier currently save for i guess Landorus due to it being able to ignore red card. I think this also looks over the fact that Ewin's specific Gouging had a super good endgame matchup into that team, where a more easily anticipated Tera Fire or Dragon wouldn't have won, since I imagine Dorron likely assumed this was a safer position given that. Again, I think you made a statement on how Roaring Moon performed in a game but I dont see how it actually has any meaningful implication on if Roaring Moon is broken or not.

https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen9ubersuu-838586
Moon got 1 kill due to Skyiew's Samu-H missing Ceaseless. Had Skyiew been running Fleur Cannon, Moon would've been a trade into Magearna. Certainly a valuable pick from Shadow's perspective, but the Moon was still far from accomplishing an actual sweep here. Although, I will concede that Shadow played recklessly with his moon and should've waited until Samu had come in first, before trying to set up a Moon sweep. But again this just sort of goes to show that Moon thrives more in (relatively) fatter matchup more than versus HO.

Since this team is used three times in this thread (original made by urs truly) ill just group all my discussion on the iterations of it here. I think G1 can just be amounted to shadow played recklessly and got rewarded with a kill that ultimately didn't matter anyways as Skyiew clutched it out. This team has a lot of tools to handle moon in Spikes pressure + ekiller with defensive teras on Magearna and Giratina to threaten it + a defensive terapagos, realistically roaring moon should not be having a good time into a team like this that is tooled to consistently handle sweepers like Roaring Moon. The one time this didn't happen was with Frito using it, which can be amounted more to the value Ewin was able to get out of the Mimikyu since it was still a relatively close game where a crit put Magearna into EQ range. And as I've said already I do not think Roaring Moon inherently "has the matchup" into this team and while that may be simply an opinion I think the team has also put up enough results to show it always has the potential to manage H/O.

In the end I do see the point you are trying to make, but I also think that the way you approached it was very reliant on unnuanced and sometimes downright bad faith arguments that opt to ignore crucial aspects of the games you cite. Many arguments here can be boiled down to net true statements about many H/O mons such as "it got phased out/killed by a reliable way to stop a sweeper" (mimikyu/terapagos) and "it struggles under offensive pressure" (historically why if stall isn't strong enough H/O rises to beat the mirror as out offensing H/O has become a standard way of handling it this gen due to how universally overbearing it is), or by simply overlooking value Roaring Moon had in games beyond sweeping, something that really needs to be considered when looking at any H/O mon since rarely does a mon's entire value revolve around it sweeping every game or bust.

There were some replays I didn't explicitly mention because they either were points I agreed on (me vs imperial) or were re-iterations of previous points I have already mentioned my issues with.

 

[Celeste]

Spectrier has been banned from Ubers UU!

 

[Bazingatron]

After the ban of Spectrier and the rising of Terapagos and Ditto, a pokemon I have noticied a lot on ladder is Annihilape. This Pokémon is seeing a growth in usage rates on ladder, usually on balance and web structures. Annihilape's typing allows it to act as a spin blocker and punish pokemon trying to get STAB off of Rapid Spin. Additionally, its bulk, alongside Bulk Up, Drain Punch, Leftovers, and Rage Fist allow it to become a late game sweeper. Hopefully Annihilape will see more usage in ladder and tours and will become an Ubers UU staple.

 

[Jusfordlolz]

Annihilape's typing allows it to act as a spin blocker and punish pokemon trying to get STAB off of Rapid Spin. Additionally, its bulk, alongside Bulk Up, Drain Punch, Leftovers, and Rage Fist allow it to become a late game sweeper.

I think another important trait Ape has is Defiant which actually allows it to punish defog. In addition to Taunt, it is actually pretty capable of shutting down Tina especially if it is running Tera fairy. This does allow it to pressure defensive cores.

However, one concern I do have with Ape is how well it performs against webs teams in general, especially considering the insane power that exists in the tier, especially since it does need some turns to setup before it can get going and its bulk is nothing special, especially compared to the offensive power in the tier right now.

 

[CodeFour]

i played this a lot when it started and it was a little fun- i checked in to see how things are going and its looking dead. Could not load a match this morning.

I don't even see anything regarding the turtle being banned on the main page or within this discussion? It's just exed off viability.

I recommend pursuing banning more things. The whole way the tier is set up with only allowing things not OU in ubers limits some cool things being involved. And then you have very overcentralizing threats in just due to their lack of being used in ubers OU, but still make it as central as ubers.

It's just not great. But. Banning a few more things would maybe give it a chance at being interesting. Just my thoughts on this dead tier. It would get more traction if it managed to resemble though not officially be called OUBL that also happens to include some of the weakest ubers. I personally don't like seeing so many arceus. I don't much care for seeing it at all. This may be antithetical to your goal of the tier but I don't think I'm exactly derailing the conversation by voicing this.

 

[Finchely]

i played this a lot when it started and it was a little fun- i checked in to see how things are going and its looking dead. Could not load a match this morning.

Sorry about this, our ladder has been in a pretty bad state for a while now. We've tried multiple times to work on it and encourage activity, but leadership is kind of stumped on how to reach a long-term solution.

I don't even see anything regarding the turtle being banned on the main page or within this discussion? It's just exed off viability.

If the main page you're referring to is this one, then yea that needs to be updated. Respectfully however, this thread is rarely ever visited, as the Pokemon Showdown teambuilder already presents the legal options for use, as well as more or less all community activity and discourse happening in the Ubers UU discord server. As such, it is not a very high priority for our keeping up-to-date. That said, as of just now however, I have gone and updated the thread.

I recommend pursuing banning more things. The whole way the tier is set up with only allowing things not OU in ubers limits some cool things being involved. And then you have very overcentralizing threats in just due to their lack of being used in ubers OU, but still make it as central as ubers.

I won't mince words. I don't think this is a very good proposal, nor do I think it really has competitive integrity at its core. "Banning more things" without direction as to what exactly we should ban or why we should ban them is an empty suggestion because it is completely inactionable. You also say that "the whole way the tier is set up ... limits some cool things being involved", but this is just how any given tier (asides from AG, which is more like a lack of tiering) works. Tiers have restrictions in place in order to create unique and competitive experiences, with emphasis on the word "competitive". We don't tier on the basis of what's "cool", as cool-ness is far too arbitrary and and individualistic to coherently agree upon. Instead, we tier based on what is or isn't competitive, which is defined as the quality of where the more-skilled player is more likely to win. There's more nuance and details when it comes to the nitty-gritty of tiering, but this sentiment works as a baseline for why we don't just alter tiers to include "cool things".

It's just not great. But. Banning a few more things would maybe give it a chance at being interesting. Just my thoughts on this dead tier. It would get more traction if it managed to resemble though not officially be called OUBL that also happens to include some of the weakest ubers. I personally don't like seeing so many arceus. I don't much care for seeing it at all. This may be antithetical to your goal of the tier but I don't think I'm exactly derailing the conversation by voicing this.

I think you very much are derailing the conversation by voicing these takes. When it comes to the number of Arceus forms in the tier, there have certainly been complaints lodged against them before, however they were all at the very least substantiated with details about why exactly they thought Arceus was a problematic presence. In your case however, it's both unhelpful and unwarranted to simply say that you "personally don't like seeing so many arceus" without actually contributing thoughtful reasoning to the discourse.

My apologies if my reply sounds overly-agressive, but it feels like you didn't exactly sit down to have a good-faith discussion here either. You open your post by calling us dead - which benefit of the doubt, yeah sure our ladder is indeed dead. In your closing paragraph however, you then double down on directly calling us a dead tier, which is just not true. If you would care to pause before you sat down to type unsubstantiated script, you might realize that UUbers has historically had and still has a pretty active tournament scene, which is where the majority of tier activity lies. I won't pretend that this is at all an acceptable substitution for our dead ladder, but I want to make a point to you how it is simply incorrect to call us a "dead tier". Furthermore, to comment so authoritatively on how we ought to tier the metagame when you clearly lack an understanding of how Smogon tiering works at all comes across as foolish at best, and rude to the people who have a personal stake in our metagame at worst.

 

[CodeFour]

As an unofficial metagame is adherence to a certain usage percentage of ubers taking a Pokemon from ubers UU necessary? It seems like it could be raised in a way to include some viable in ubers OU Pokemon in ubers UU. I get how the tiering is set up. It doesn't change that it feels weird as applied here.

No authority I was just giving my opinion. No offense meant.

 

[Celeste]

As an unofficial metagame is adherence to a certain usage percentage of ubers taking a Pokemon from ubers UU necessary? It seems like it could be raised in a way to include some viable in ubers OU Pokemon in ubers UU. I get how the tiering is set up. It doesn't change that it feels weird as applied here.

No authority I was just giving my opinion. No offense meant.

While yes we are an unofficial metagame that means in theory we could be more liberal with rulings, especially recently we have chosen to stay more aligned to the style of usage based tiering used by the official tiers for the sake of consistency. Its is in the name that the goal is focus more on Ubers not viable in Ubers rather then just pokemon banned from OU, which do still have niches in our tier (Roaring Moon, Gouging Fire, Palafin, etc). It might feel weird for you, but at the end of the day we focus on tier balance/health on not making certain pokemon more/less viable. Our goal is to make a balanced tier using the guidelines we have set, being the standardized usage based tiering system based on Ubers usage stats.

 

[Finchely]

I am making this post as a more organized and thought-out version of a mini-tirade I had in the discord a short while ago. I know that people don't follow our forums much anymore, but I am writing this anyways for referencing purposes if the topic is ever brought up again.

But first, some levity.

"Ubers UU is dead", and similar such phrases have been used to disparage our tier for quite some time now. It's a lazy way of disrespecting and discrediting all of the hard work and activity that the tier does receive. I was able to dismiss such remarks in the past, chocking it up to the delusions of dull-witted haters. These days however, I've seen a noticeable uptick in fearmongering that UUbers is dying or that it is outright dead, and I would like to address these allegations.

DISCLAIMER: I have no clue who could potentially be reading this, but I hope that this post is able to genuinely connect with as many people as possible. That said, if you are only here to mindlessly ragebait and tierbash, you can kindly fuck off and disappear without so much as a trace. At this point, I have run out of both patience and tolerance for your ilk.

For those that missed it, there was a recent announcement that Ubers UU usage statistics would no longer pull from ladder data, but rather from tournament data. This is because our ladder has reached a point such that the data is so skewed that it paints an overly-distorted picture of what our tier is actually like. It's no secret that the Ubers UU ladder has been dying for quite some time. This is not something I will attempt to sugarcoat. But to say that our lack of ladder activity is entirely analogous to the rest of our tier is blatantly false, ignorant at best, and bad-faith argumentation at worst.

Anyone worth a damn who has spent a significant amount of time in Ubers UU will know that we have always had a relatively strong tournament scene. I feel like I shouldn't have to evince this statement because of how obvious it is, but I will anyways because I am feeling particularly petty right now.

• Ubers UU Seasonal 2025: 104 signups (plus uncounted subs)
• Ubers UU Open 2025: 97 signups (plus uncounted subs)
• UMBD I: 100 signups
• UUbers Swiss 2: 178 signups

Granted, UUbers Swiss was a money tour which inflated its signups to nearly 1.8 times what we usually get, but the other figures still should make it absolutely crystal clear to anyone with a brain that we are not a dead tier.

There're also those that call us a dying tier, which I also believe to be both incorrect and a lazy way of commenting on a more nuanced situation. It's undeniable that Ubers UU has seen better days, and especially in the discord there has been a lot of reminiscing on what Ubers UU used to be. What I've found however, is that It's too easy to accept "dying" as the truth of the matter, and not that our expectations for our tier's projected growth were unrealistic to begin with.
Let me put it this way:

• Kinesquared was not an expert in tier management
• Our initial council was filled with people who didn't understand tiering well (myself included)
• Our initial playerbase was filled with people who didn't have the most competitive interests at heart
• A lot of the initial attention we recieved after being unveiled as Smogon's newest UM was from new-toy-syndrome casuals who didn't have the most competitive interests at heart
• It is normal that a UM founded in 2023 SV with not even 2 years of history doesn't have a fully-developed playerbase / consistent activity

Allow me to bring it back to the initial point for a moment. Calling us a dying tier implies that we are on our way to tier death, as in our tier activity will have all but ceased in the near future. I think that this is cringe fearmongering and misinterpretation of our current circumstances. To say that we are dying because we could not live up to our initial expectations, when those expectations in the first place were the issue all along, is greatly misleading. In fact even trying to argue that our tier activity will have all but ceased is itself a difficult point to argue given our tournament activity. Indeed, the 2024 Open and 2024 Seasonal had 120 signups and 56 signups respectively. If you imagine the data points in chronological order, there really is just no clear trend indicating a declining tournament showing.

I would also like to readdress the topic of our ladder in greater detail, because I feel there is more on the topic that must be said, that I wasn't able to beforehand. There are concerns that our lack of ladder games will lead to a ladder deletion, which will lead to even further visibility issues. And to be honest, leadership is kind of stumped on what to do in terms of upping ladder activity. We've tried ladder tours, twice even, to no avail. Suspect tests never permanently improve ladder health, only ever invigorating it for the duration of the suspect. Ladder achievements aren't truly viable because we have no way of backing them up with a reward other than community prestige. And we've also attempted laddering activities with youtubers to no avail (it certainliy doesn't help that Aim hates arceus in our tier lol). To be honest, we might be facing ladder deletion... and that's ok. Now don't get me wrong, ladder deletion provides us no benefits and is only a detriment. But it isn't the death sentence that some think it is either. Take another UM that I've been heavily involved with recently: NFE. NFE hasn't had a ladder in a long ass time, yet its meta is still progressing forwards quite well due to an active council and motivated community. My point is that even if we don't have a ladder, we can still make things work.

Oh, and we also have regular room tournaments courtesy of afairy, which are another great way to play the format and also introduce new players to our meta.

I want to end by saying that I truly do empathize when it comes to looking back fondly upon better times in the tier's history, both as a metagame and as a community. As someone with the highest combined value of tier history and tier involvement, it's something that I've really done a lot of. Which is why It also frustrates me to no end to constantly hear that Ubers UU is a dying or dead tier. It is not. And saying so is frankly disrespectful to the immense amount of effort it's taken to create and maintain the tier to this day, alongside the equally valuable players who take our metagame seriously by showing up to play in tournaments. I know that when compared to our initial dreams of what could have been, the current state of Ubers UU can seem like a pitiful sight to behold. But that's ok, because as sad as it may seem, there's still so much potential in our tier. It may take another entire generation, it may even take two generations, but we'll get there. But as much as it takes good leadership to build up a community, the community is also responsible for responding in kind and doing its part to perpetuate its existence. Which is all to say, Ubers UU ain't dying, nor is it dead. But it certainly will if community members are gonna keep pretending like it is.

 

[Celeste]

Wanted to share my thoughts as well as a newer member to the community who has put a lot of time and effort into working to become both an active member of the community but a support for the tier in general. Its not unknown to people that my time in Ubers UU started not even a full year ago, and thus I don't have the same experience with the history of the tier and community as the rest of you do. This has especially become apparent in recent months as I see lots of discussion about the tiers past as Finchely mentioned above, when I simply don't have the same emotional ties to those times.

From my perspective, yes this tier has absolutely had some points that have contributed in certain decreases to activity and good faith engagement with the tier, with notable instances for me being the discussions around Zacian and Tera, and then ensuing trolling that happened in response to certain decisions being made. But I have also only seen the heart of the tier that stays committed do more and more to help make this tier a better place; Frito's dedication as a tier leader and A Fairy's contributions to all UMs through her room tours and strength as UM leader, and the community at large through developments in recent team tours and the ongoing Seasonal. Ladder only represents a small facet of what makes UUbers the tier that it is, and I have complete faith that we will be able to continue to grow our incredible tour scene in the years to come.

I mentioned it in discord, but I am committed to continuing my own efforts in providing resources and discussion to the tier and doing my best to help make the avenues we do have as accessible as possible. This tier has brought me so much fun and so many friends in the 8 months I've been here and I will proudly keep supporting it and the people who make this tier special, and I encourage you all to do the same. This tier has clearly gone through lots of change and thats not stopping anytime soon, but just because we have changed doesn't mean the change is for the worst and that we can't continue contributing and enjoying UUbers. I'm excited to see where this tier goes and what journey we all go on together going forwards.

Meta wise? Expect a post from me around whenever my seasonal run comes to an end, as I think there is something that warrants some discussion on potential action but I want to get a few more games in/watch others to see if I still hold those beliefs in a few weeks lol.

Thanks for reading, love yall