Council Vote
| Pokemon / Move / Ability |  Anchor9 |  Ivy |  Solosis |  VannAccessible |  Final Verdict |
|---|
 Terastallization | BAN | BAN | BAN | BAN | 4-0-0 |
 Booster Energy | ABSTAIN | DO NOT BAN | ABSTAIN | BAN | 1-2-1 |
 Imprison | RESTRICT | RESTRICT | RESTRICT | RESTRICT | 4-0-0 |
 Night Shade | ABSTAIN | DO NOT RESTRICT | DO NOT RESTRICT | RESTRICT | 1-1-2 |
 Seismic Toss | ABSTAIN | DO NOT RESTRICT | DO NOT RESTRICT | DO NOT RESTRICT | 0-1-3 |
 Taunt | RESTRICT | RESTRICT | RESTRICT | RESTRICT | 4-0-0 |
 Drought | BAN | ABSTAIN | BAN | BAN | 3-1-0 |
 Electric Surge | BAN | ABSTAIN | DO NOT BAN | BAN | 2-1-1 |
Terastallization:
While making the banlist, I admit, I overlooked Terastallization. The council strongly believes Tera is absurdly broken and volatile, and does not contribute to the metagame in any healthy way. Vann has already covered how defensive Tera is much worse in this hyper offensive metagame, especially since you are not guaranteed that the Tera type will resist both linked components. He also explained how Pokemon can reach absurd levels of damage that almost guarantee an OHKO on anything, and how Tera Blast is very oppressive. All things considered, we all now believe Terastalisation should obviously go.
Booster Energy:
Booster Energy is a weird one. It has been on our watchlist since the very beginning, and I am honestly more inclined to ban it. However, we all want to test it before giving a clear opinion on whether Booster Energy itself is broken or only some of its users, such as Iron Valiant, Iron Moth, and Walking Wake, who are among our top suspects. If anything, I personally feel its days are numbered, even if it is saved today.
Imprison:
That nasty Imprison Transform cheese? Yeah, please get rid of it. (Mew wasn't banned instead of Imprison because Smeargle can also abuse these strategies to a lesser extent).
Night Shade / Seismic Toss:
We are not really concerned about these two moves due to their lack of good distribution, especially Seismic Toss. Either the options were not that good, or they were better off using different Linked moves. We would like to test them more before we restrict them. Though we are a bit more concerned about Night Shade over Seismic Toss because it has quite a few more abusers, such as Dragapult, Gengar, and Pecharunt.
Taunt:
It was a tough call, but we recommended restricting Taunt because of its potential to shut down defensive counterplay completely. An attack move + Taunt is enough to wear down defensive checks by preventing healing. We also thought that keeping Taunt unrestricted could be a meaningful way to prevent setup moves from becoming too dominant. However, for now, we believe that instead of stopping Hyper Offensive sweeps, Taunt is helping them more, which is why it should be restricted. This gives Balance and Stall a small but much-needed buff.
Drought:
While I mentioned in the Booster Energy section that we want to test Protosynthesis (and Quark Drive) mons more before taking any action, Drought felt like killing two birds with one stone since it could also allow Chlorophyll to be unbanned. We are certain Sun teams will be really strong, not only because of the speed but also because of the variety of options we have for teammates, and how this metagame favours such offensive archetypes. If anything, Drought felt like a better starting point to fix these issues in this metagame. However, Ivy wanted to test it a bit more, so it gets to stay for now. Our biggest question right now is, will manual Sun be a good archetype in this meta after we ban Drought?
Electric Surge:
Unlike Drought, you do not have many options for the Electric Terrain archetype and are usually forced to use Pincurchin on such teams. As much as we would like to unban Raichu-Alola, a few of us (especially me) feel that Electric Surge is just not good enough to warrant an early ban.
Following the ban of Terastallization, Regieleki & Terapagos have been unbanned from Linked!
Regieleki (Unban):
Speed is really important in this meta, but we do not think the speed king will do anything significant after Tera gets banned.
Terapagos (Unban):
The same goes for Terapagos; we believe it will be a decent mon in the meta once Tera is gone.
That’s about it for now. Our next council vote will likely take place once the meta has been fully coded and we’ve finished testing.
Until then, keep the ideas coming! We’d love to hear more about what you think the right direction for the metagame should be, what the watchlist and future tiering changes might look like, and all the cool and creative sets you’ve been sharing.
See you all soon O/
@ Heavy-Duty Boots
