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Gonna spend some time talking about Ghost/Flying, and why I believe it should not be slated.
1: Being weak to Knock Off here is quite frankly, really bad for us. We really don't need any more encouragement for the opponent to click Knock Off, since our weakness to Stealth Rock (On most of the Flying-types) is already enough to encourage the opponent to do this. Being weak to both at the same time pretty much greatly increases the value of using Knock Off against us, to a degree that I believe that the opponent will usually want to do so in spite of the threat of Beak Blast. This greatly reduces the odds that we end up wanting to click Beak Blast, as there's really not going to be any point in making the trade if we don't gain at least as much value from it as our opponent.
2: Funnily enough, I actually think the Rapid Spin immunity is an overall net-negative for us here, since we no longer have the opportunity to threaten spinners with a burn, meaning we actually have less potential opportunities to get value out of Beak Blast burns. This is most noticeable against Great Tusk and Equilibra, the first of which is pretty much always going to click Knock Off (Which go back to my prior point about why that's bad), and the later of which is just not going to bother to click Rapid Spin and is either going to click Doom Desire or just switch out. Being able to punish Rapid Spinners with burns is also just a really cool potential interaction, and it would be a shame to take it off the table due to our typing.
3: Ghost doesn't really have too many good options for physical STAB, with pretty much every option coming with some caveat (Shadow Claw is insanely weak, Shadow Bone isn't in the game, and Poltergeist requires us to forgo Knock Off support when slotting ourselves onto a team). This is admittedly the least problematic aspect of the typing, with the other two things I mentioned being far more significant.
Took some time to think about the typings at play, and honestly? I think I want to argue just a bit against Steel/Flying.
The main thing I want to argue is that the type doesn't feel like it synergizes incredibly well with Beak Blast. For one, Steel/Flying is probably the Flying type combo with the least need for Heavy Duty Boots...ever? Neutrality to stealth rocks and immunity to all other hazards, combined with resistances to most forms of chip damage means that, unless we strip this mon of recovery outside of Leftovers(which might incentivise Knock Off a little too much, if you ask me), its not really inviting Knock Off towards it to begin with. It also doesn't invite many other attacks into it, thanks to its stellar amount of resistances. While that does mean that a Steel/Flying 37 can discourage the few attacks that threaten it with Beak Blast while taking minimal chip damage elsewhere, the emphasis on "few" is heavy. The amount of Pokémon that fear Beak Blast's effect, can do meaningful damage to the type, and aren't threatened out by Flying STAB alone is... quite small. While there are still use cases against mons that don't fit this mold (for example, Flying weak mons that can 2hko 37 but are afraid of getting burned after it switches in), The pool of Pokémon that opens up still seems pretty quaint. I'm truthfully not sure if there's been enough talk about if the type is actually all that synergistic with Beak Blast or not, and I love to be proven wrong if it does synergize better than I thought, but those are my thoughts atm.
Steel/Flying shouldn't be on the slate in my humble opinion. Aside from the points of synergy with Beak Blast, the sheer reality of it is that we are going to be pigeonholed into creating a Corviknight or Skarmory clone. With the offensive coverage of the combo being so incredibly terrible, and Steel having mediocre STAB options, we will end up with a Steel bird that uses a Flying STAB that can burn.
Quick post to show my opinions on some typings before slate goes up. Going over the six most popular Flying type combos (at least the ones I've seen the most discussion around)
Dark/Flying is the most popular type in the Discord and for good reason. It's very solid all around and has a lot of appealing traits - neutralities to Fighting and Bug giving it decent matchups into Great Tusk and U-turn spammers, a Ghost resistance making it good into Dragapult, Gholdengo, and Kitsunoh, maintaining the Grass resist for a better Wogerpon matchup, and a resistance to Knock Off making it hurt a little less to lose its Boots. Not much more to say about this that hasn't been said in the Discord.
I've been going back and forth on this for a couple days, but I think Water/Flying just barely edges out Dark/Flying for my favorite typing for this CAP. It's got everything we want - checks Wogerpon, resists Fire (a common typing in the current metagame), and most importantly, it resists Fighting and Bug, so its matchups into the U-turn spammers and mons like Great Tusk and Zamazenta are even better than Dark/Flying's matchups into those same types, which is what pushes Water/Flying over the edge as my personal favorite. Again, not much more to say about this, it's just fantastic all around and should absolutely be a lock.
Was a bit iffy on this typing at first TBH, but it's grown on me quite a lot recently. What makes this typing stand out to me is that of all of the Flying type combinations that have been suggested, this is easily the most offensively oriented one (aside from Dark/Water, but I'll touch more on that a bit later), which would be a really unique and fascinating route to take since IMO I feel like a lot of the the other suggestions lean more towards favoring bulk and defense. My one concern is that the Water weakness doesn't make us as good of a Wogerpon check as the other Flying type combos
Okay I'm sorry DbD but I am just not a fan of this one. I did consider this typing briefly at the beginning of the stage because it is the best Wogerpon counter we have, but outside of Woger, the metagame absolutely hates this typing. Kyurem, Glowking, Hemogoblin, Moltres, Mollux, Dragonite, Iron Moth, and Pecharunt are all top tier threats in the current metagame... and that's just the A ranks. I want to like this typing a lot, I really do, but Grass's weaknesses just hurt this typing in the long run more than its resistances help IMO.
This typing falls into a similar boat as Grass/Flying in that it's a typing I considered briefly but ultimately ended up disliking due to one huge flaw with the typing. In Ghost/Flying's case, it's the weakness to Knock Off. DPM hit the nail on the head on why I think this specifically is such a big dealbreaker so I'm not going to go too much in depth, but almost all Flying combos will bait Knock Off by sheer virtue of relying on HDB, so it's way more important to make Knock Off hurt less than actually baiting it to proc Beak Blast. I actually do think this typing is really cool and actually really good into the metagame generally, but unfortunately this just isn't the right concept for it.
The final typing that I'm not too keen on, but not for the reasons other people have stated. I'm not worried about CAP37 competing with Corviknight (likely differing roles aside corviknight is currently B+ on the CAP viability rankings, the competition is solid but definitely beatable lol) and the fact that we've already made a Steel/Flying CAP in Cawmodore matters to me even less (IDK where the imaginary rule that CAPs can't repeat a type combo came from but it should die already. honestly it's more surprising that we haven't repeated a type combo yet since we've made almost 40 CAPs LMAOOOOOOOOO). What makes Steel/Flying unappealing to me is that... it's just a really boring option honestly. I don't think I need to explain why Steel/Flying is one of the best defensive typings out there, but that insane defensive prowess is what sours my opinion on this type. Beak Blast has at least some level of synergy with every other typing I've talked about in this post that would create a really unique process that would fulfill the concept, but because this typing is so good on its own, I can't help but feel like a Steel/Flying CAP37 would be defined more by its typing - a mon with a powerhouse typing that just so happens to run Beak Blast as its Flying STAB. I really don't like this typing and would prefer to see it off of the slate.
The Steel / Flying hate is a bit weird to me cause it's sorta ignoring a lot of fundamentals about the typing. We're not gonna be running Steel + Flying STAB on the mon, we're probably giving the mon either U-turn or Flamethrower or Wave Crash or whatever as a secondary click, and its very easy to compete with Corv cause Corv is well, the most passive mon in the tier, and Beak Blast by itself makes us dramatically less passive than it. To me the interesting thing about Steel/Flying is that its so good as a defensive typing that we can afford to skimp on some traditional defensive tools, pull a Celesteela, and make a mon that is just as Knock-weak as Moltres, if not moreso.
Water / Dark sorta echoes back to why we chose Beak Blast in the first place over stuff like Stomping Tantrum. We were worried a ton that Tantrum would be a supporting move to the mon, and not remotely the focus of the mon's set, and frankly speaking, that's Beak Blast on a Water/Dark type. Realistically you need Beak Blast for Arghonaut and Zamazenta, and basically nothing else. No matter your SpA stat, you will be able to OHKO Tusk with a STAB Surf (see early-gen Leaf Storm Meowscarada), and while this is a typing that I could see having the moveslots to run Beak Blast (no need for recovery), its getting clicked fairly rarely.
Grass / Flying is weirdly sorta cool in the context that we're in a Tera generation, and while yeah, the base typing is some of the most exploitable stuff ever, its actually got a weirdly good offensive presence, and while you don't have a ton of resists, you can still bring it in vs a lot of the tier's defensive mons, cause water-types don't run Ice Beam in generation 9. Again, this is basically setting the rest of the cap up for a moderately difficult journey, but I don't think its remotely an impossible journey. Overall I think this is on-par with Dragon/Flying (please also note dragon/fly doesn't ever run dragon moves), and has some really cool upsides.
So. A lot of very good posts, and not enough slate positions. I'd have happily slated another three easily, but I ended up with these eight as it stands currently. So let's talk about this, shall we?
Overall, in the slate as a whole, I've come to determine that I wanted my approach to be about range. We've yet to really settle into what CAP37's presence in a battle entails, which has led to a wide range of submissions of all kinds. Is CAP37 a defensive behemoth that demands you slam into it with all your might in order to remove it, dramatically limiting your own damage output later on as a result? Is CAP37 instead an offensive powerhouse with a wide-reaching set of STABs (including or alongside Beak Blast) daring you to hit it to eliminate it, thus trading your own damage for removing its own? Is it something somewhat in between, or something else entirely?
I do not believe it is my choice alone to push this direction, and that the voting will strongly direct us one way or another. As such, the slate I've chosen contains multitudes, a wide range of distinct and nuanced typings that can lead us down a large number of paths depending on what we end up with at the end of this all. Like I mentioned, even bursting at the edges with options I still felt that I didn't have nearly enough space.
I also wished to take community sentiment into consideration, thank you to all that spent time in the thread and live chat spaces discussing the various types and even making some suggestions that didn't make it to thread (Ice/Rock solidarity!) which has helped me create a slate that I believe will give everyone in the community something to root for and probably also something to be upset about me over. So let's start.
Thoughts on what I did include:
I am not going to spend a ton of time talking about Dark, Dark / Flying, Water / Flying. The thread and livechats are littered with conversations discussing in depth the benefits of these types, and while not every single person has been sold on these types, few folks are adamantly against any of them.
Now, Flying has received relatively little conversation since my previous post, but the more I think on this type, the more fond I grow of it. Tornadus is certainly a hard act to match up to, but I really do not think that the pure Flying type is much of that reason. While frankly this typing does the least to advance a role, a lack of strongly pre-defined role is itself a position that one can fill in the metagame as we head into Ability, as the typings around it on the slate attest to the range that "must use Beak Blast" can provide.
The supposed cousins Dragon / Flying and Grass / Flying are interesting. I am quite curious about these types, as the two camps (for and against) seem to be really strongly dug in. However, something that I find myself disagreeing with on a larger scale is the similarity of these types. I simply do not think these types are similar, and I think that the arguments against especially the latter lead me to this conclusion. We have yet to have a type on this slate that leans towards the "yeah you can hit me and it'll sting but at what cost" compared to a more defensive typing that is the former. Perhaps this is a strange angle to be taking, but I certainly have been known to think outside of the box, and I quite want a more unorthodox option that leans that direction that isn't the fan favorites from the first trio listed in explanations. The latter is also the only type that I've raised from "a lot to be slated", in part because I do believe there is a unique avenue to be explored here that isn't really done anywhere else.
Now, two types that I really do think are closely related and only one could reasonably be slated here, and I've chosen Steel / Flying over its cousin I'll talk about later. I have given much consideration to what the format looks like, and what this slate looks like, and I have found arguments against this typing lacking. Now, mind you, the original suggestion for this typing was also pretty weak, but there has been a lot of conversation on this type and as to why it's legitimate. Even some of the anti posts go on about how it's boring or too good, things that I do not think should impact presence on a slate. The only argument I have found particularly meaningful (such that this typing was nearly not on the slate) has been its overlap in the metagame, which I will discuss later.
And so we reach Rock / Flying, the final member of the slate to be discussed in this post. Much that I've said regarding this type prior remains true, and this is the one on the "likely" list that has seen the most advocacy that wasn't one of the golden children mentioned in the first paragraph. This is far and away the most offensive typing on the slate, and given the level of support it has seen (I'm struggling to find any post that actively pushes against it) it seems like a no-brainer to include.
Now, I'm not going to talk a ton about what missed the slate, but I will go over some notable exclusions. You will notice that there are going to be three typings I talk about excluding, the same number I had mentioned at the start of this post. This is not a coincidence, but limitations and restriction breed creativity and it has been a joy--albiet a difficult process--a joy to figure out what this slate will be.
Unfortunately for Dark / Water, worries 4MSS rear its ugly head, I cannot in good conscious slate a typing that would require significant effort on behalf of future stages to corral into ensuring that Beak Blast was always ran, and even then I'm not convinced that some sets would drop the move just for the opportunity to threaten the possibility of it without the need to run it and limit its non-STAB options. This is something I believe to be anti-concept, so much so that I didn't even bring up the possibility of it being pro-concept in my second set of questions.
In what may be one of my least popular "leave off"s, I've chosen to not include Ground / Flying on the slate. You probably already have an opinion one way or another on whether type overlap in the metagame is a problem, and whether it effects this typing or S/F more. I have chosen to, after consideration of arguments for and against, stick with my perspective. While the VR is not omnipotent, I do believe that this typing would have considerably harder time making itself a meaningful consideration for teams against the wealth of Ground-types in the format, compared to S/F's two primary competitors and various other Steel-type neighborhood friends. I feel like the competition for Ground/Flying is much harder to overcome in the current metagame, both in terms of "are you really running multiple Ground-types btwn CAP37 and Glisc/Lando/Tusk/Equi/Ting" and in terms of "how does CAP37 make itself distinct against Glisc/Lando". I do not feel like S/F has nearly as hard a time on either of these questions.
The last typing I want to talk about is Ghost / Flying, which I was uncertain on and while I have seen both arguments for and against, this one perhaps struggles the most in the sense that I am limited in my options. An immunity to Rapid Spin and a mortal fear of Knock Off seriously restrict CAP37's ability to accomplish burns, even ignoring stuff like Pursuit being long-gone or it being immune to Fighting-type moves. In another world, perhaps we could've seen this typing, but I think that world is not the one we currently communicate in.
And so, we have our slate, alphabetized. Dark Dark / Flying Dragon / Flying Grass / Flying
Flying Rock / Flying Steel / Flying Water / Flying
I have no doubt that there will be plenty of folks with strong opinions, for and against, some of the decisions I made here, and I welcome these. I did not ask to be on TLT or accept the first non-TL stage as my responsibility with the expectation that I could create some perfect community-pleasing slate. I put myself up as a maverick of sorts, someone who thinks outside of the box, and this slate certainly is not a hyper-orthodox approach to this process. Sure, I didn't go off the edge of the boat by slating a bunch of non-STAB options or what have you, but I think I am happy with this slate, both in the meaning of any of these potentially winning, but also my own personal views of how I want to engage in the CAP process.
And so it is with great gratitude to the TLT and to the community that I hand the baton back to earthflax to finalize this slate. Should they change the slate, please be aware that their goals are different than mine, they are steward of a much bigger picture than I am. If they make a move you disagree with, that is not something to hold against them, unlike I, who will be understanding if I am the target of your ire for a decision I made along the way or at the end. Regardless I want to thank all of you for a wonderful week and a half or so, you all have made a freshman TLT member who's spent a long time in CAP quite happy. See you all in the next stage where I return among the masses to answer questions and suggest things that don't quite make sense!
