Discussion Sand Attack Skarmory and Agility Pass in GSC OU

[elodin]

Current GSC OU is quite a balanced metagame with a plethora of viable playstyles. Offense is as good as it has ever been, as Cloyster is one of the very best Pokémon in the tier and Forretress also functions as a pretty solid spiker for some of these teams. More balanced teams that have both Spikes and Spin Pokémon are also quite good right now, as both Starmie and Golem are great at checking multiple threats in the tier while also providing the much appreciated Spin support. Stall is also an extremely viable and good option in the tier, as GSC definitely offers multiple solutions to the various threats the playstyle can face.

That being said, there are two elements in the tier right now that I think swing certain matchups into extremely coinflippy scenarios: Sand Attack Skarmory stall and Agility Pass teams. The first is a more competitively-viable approach since most Agility Pass teams can get beat with most viable builds and proper gameplan, so I'll start with that.

Sand Attack completely invalidates one of the best answers offense has against stall in CurseLix, meaning Skarmory can repeatedly come in on it and force scenarios where Lix is essentially forced to risk a low accuracy Boom which can lose you the game outright. If you respect Sand Attack in the builder, the possibilities of teams get extremely narrowed, as you have to come up with different alternatives to break through Skarmory which are suboptimal in every single other matchup.

This is similar to Tentacruel stall, as Tentacruel completely shuts down the two most common spikers in the tier and essentially forces you to either have a dedicated slot to beating stall (like Vap) or spinblocking alternatives to prevent it from keeping hazards off for free the whole game. The key difference here is that Tentacruel doesn't base its usage purely on RNG, while Sand Attack Skarmory does, and even in the matchups where Tentacruel's Spin is limited, there is still room for outplaying your opponent with correct predictions and aggressive plays (see OmBrArch vs me in SPL week 7, where I had a very good matchup into Tentacruel stall but OmBrArch managed to win the game by making a multitude of correct plays + having Tyranitar to trap my Gengar).

Sand Attack Skarmory essentially makes Steelix offense completely reliant on hitting a low accuracy Boom and turns these matchups into rolling a dice. This single move essentially eliminates one of the few standard ways to beat stall and makes it extremely annoying to prepare vs, because, like I said, your options in the builder are extremely limited if you respect Sand Attack.

Now onto the second problem, Agility Pass teams are also extremely flippy and uncompetitive. It's evident that things like BD Lax and SD Marowak can get out of hand if you don't properly plan around them, and although it is true that most respectable competitive teams automatically have tools to handle Agility Pass decently well, that doesn't exclude the fact that they can be extremely uncompetitive in multiple scenarios.

Agility Pass essentially forces you to carefully plan out, from turn 1, what all your plays are gonna be in a game. Since Smeargle can Spore any phazing options, the first chain can quite literally decide a game on the spot. Smeargle leading turn 1 vs offense and getting Agilty off means you are forced into your phazer early in the match. Whether your opponent is gonna predict the phazer to come in and Spore turn 2 or just raw Baton Pass and start the chain turn 2 is really up to them, but this is already a "50/50" scenario that is extremely problematic when dealing vs these teams. And then we have a situation where your opponent can pass to any of Snorlax, Scizor, Marowak or Machamp (the last 2 depending on their coverage options). If they pass to Marowak and and force you into your Cloyster, the game is literally decided by Rock Slide flinching or not. On the same note, usually these teams dedicate one of Marowak/Machamp to run HP Bug to kill Exeggutor for the other, but they can also run Substitute/Protect to troll Boom.

To sum it up, any game vs Agility Pass becomes a guessing game of 1) whether your opponent is gonna Spore your phazer with Smeargle early or start the chain; 2) whether or not Rock Slide from Marowak is gonna flinch Cloyster; 3) whether or not Marowak/Machamp are running a coverage option to nuke one of their common checks to assist the other or Protect/Sub to troll Boom. It makes the game extremely flippy and uncompetitive, and therefore should also not be a viable strategy.

That said, I firmly believe GSC is the most competitive and balanced old generation right now, as every playstyle is viable and you can effectively implement multiple different tools in the builder to assist you in particular matchups. These 2 playstyles, however, are extremely uncompetitive and flip games on their heads, as they make RNG the deciding factor in every single game they're brought in. When it comes to Sand Attack, this limits the options you have in the builder tremendously, as you can't rely on one of stall's most common answers to beat it anymore. When it comes to Agility Pass, even though you can likely be solid against it with any common competitive team, you can lose games extremely early on based on a single "50/50" lost.

So, with all that in mind, here are the solutions I propose:

Sand Attack - we should ban the move entirely, as it is a purely RNG based strategy that makes it uncompetitive. This is also true for moves like Swagger, Attract and Confuse Ray, but they are not as problematic as they are not used nearly as much. I also think all of these moves should probably be banned to improve the tier, but that can be a conversation for the future.

Baton Pass - there are 2 options here:
1) limit the Baton Pass users to 1 user per team: this would prevent Pass chains and solve its issues; or
2) ban Speed passing: this would allow players to deal with Baton Pass without having to rely on the coinflippy/RNG scenarios (e.g. Marowak flinching Cloyster early game and literally ending the game).

Both of these options are better than a raw Baton Pass ban since other type of Baton Pass teams are healthy and bring for variety to the tier (e.g. Growth Passing from Jolteon/Vaporeon/Espeon which we have seen multiple times this SPL).

 

[gorgie]

Current GSC OU is quite a balanced metagame with a plethora of viable playstyles. Offense is as good as it has ever been, as Cloyster is one of the very best Pokémon in the tier and Forretress also functions as a pretty solid spiker for some of these teams. More balanced teams that have both Spikes and Spin Pokémon are also quite good right now, as both Starmie and Golem are great at checking multiple threats in the tier while also providing the much appreciated Spin support. Stall is also an extremely viable and good option in the tier, as GSC definitely offers multiple solutions to the various threats the playstyle can face.

Click to collapse...

dude, you said it all yourself. the tier is fine as it is.

we all know where this is coming from and to reiterate what was said in the past: if these strategies were so bonkers they would have warped the metagame way out of whack already with everyone spamming them.

the big reason outside of the tier being VERY WELL-BALANCED as it is that these "uncompetitive" strategies aren't being used is the HUGE OPPORTUNITY COST. Running these strategies mean you're taking a risk in the builder to fish against the huge swathe of teams that do very well into SA/Agility stuff, hoping you catch an auto-win mu in the process. This is nothing new in competitive Pokemon.

Why ban RNG elements in an RNG-BASED game if they're not adding elements of brokenness or restriction to the tier? In fact it has added NEW, HEALTHY STRATEGIES to help with playing around certain threats.

Sand Veil in ADV was banned because it was PROVEN to be bonkers. ABR's/vapi/etc sand veil teams were racking up free wins on cruise control in adv so clearly something had to be done since it was skewing and straining the meta to adapt to it.

PROVE that SA and Agility BP has elements of brokenness over a consistent set of games and THEN we can have a productive conversation about how to proceed.

Until then, reals over feelz.

Carapinga

 

[aminita]

Sand attack is wack. It’s not overwhelmingly powerful but its sole trait is to add extra variance often where before there was none. It is only as effective as it is because people generally don’t want to have their winpath decided by a dice roll that wasn’t there until the sand attack user added it. If people boomed their lix/sd-lax anyway on sand attack skarm it’d be very apparent how stupid the dynamics the move causes is. It is not an overpowering force in the metagame but serves to further divorce the outcome of the game from the plays made by each person, which is why I’d be very happy to see it go. Mons is a game with variance baked into every interaction, but by removing elements that solely exist to add dice rolls where there were none, we make this game more conducive to player skill deciding the outcome of the battle. Ban this shit, ideally alongside confuse ray, swagger etc.

I dislike opportunity cost being brought up as a defence for sand attack et al. I don’t see how someone shooting themselves in the foot with cheesy elements would excuse the ability for said elements to rob games. Using 6 quick claw mons or 6 swagger mons would obviously not be competitively viable but that doesn’t mean it cannot steal games and further seperate player skill from determining the outcome of a game.

With a competitive game we should strive to put the outcome of the game in the hands of the players as best as possible, but we should not lose sight of the actual games that brought us here. Banning elements that only serve to add RNG is a step towards a more skilful game and has zero collateral on the core infrastructure of the game we play.


Agility pass is a whole different can of worms, and I don’t think it’s that bad. I’ll admit that tech options having contrasting responses (think sub on lax/wak) can be obnoxious (especially with the fast paced games the style lends itself to,) but I don’t think its overwhelming nor sufficiently different from something like vap running protect to get around cloy boom. I also don’t think smeargle spore/bp mind games tend to be problematically flippy either, good teams will have options other than the last ditch spore-phazer guessing game. Agility pass doesn’t feel like a strong or generally viable archetype in the meta and well constructed teams tend to have many tools to handle the agility pass MU. I see it more as a mix up tool than anything that can punish an opponent being greedy in the builder. It is an archetype pretty unique to the tier that rewards innovation in the builder, so I’d be saddened to see it go. Do nothing > Limit to one speed passer > Ban speed pass.

 

[melancholy0]

I think at this point I would support a full BP ban, or at least limiting it to one user per team. While in the past, BP acted as primarily a limiting factor on building (generally a good thing) with rare usage, from the results of the most recent GSC invitational, the next crop of up-and-coming and midlevel players is heavily using BP which means that we should probably reexamine its merits as it will be a larger force in the meta for the next while. While I agree with Elodin’s general point about GSC being a player focused tier, to add on from a different perspective:

1. Based on the odds to win vs a better player, the equilibrium usage of BP for the worse player in a Bo3 should range 10% to 50%+ usage, while currently its below 10% (from round 1 of GSC cup Smeargle's usage is at 3.75%, with a 50% win rate). BP can often get into spots where it’s a flinch / crit away from winning, which assuming a 30% chance to win the game, translates to a 0.09 + 0.063*2 = 21.6% chance of winning a set vs anyone.
2. Given the fast pace, you can literally flow chart almost every interaction and can force the 30% (if not higher) odds in most games. I have no interest in ruining cup, so I will decline to create one, but as an exercise to the reader you can try double electric Machamp. There are enough different flavours of BP going around that there is one with a positive MU for almost every team.
3. Given the above 2 points, I don’t see the point in playing a tier where the optimal strategy for the worse player is to bring an assortment of BP teams and play them with near 0 ingame skill (literally 0 if following a flowchart).

While I think a lot of above discussion is due to differences in playing philosophy (how much building vs playing ability should be rewarded), but regardless of your opinion on the above, the odds from BP are too good given the near 0 effort in both aspects of the game to pull them off.

For luck moves and items, they actually require some ingame ability to take advantage of them, and are far from broken (almost all are suboptimal). I would actually unban brightpowder in GSC as outside of Charizard, where it has tradeoffs with quickclaw and focus band, its not an good item.

Sand attack is closer to spinTenta than luck moves I would say, where there are some teams that fish these pokemon to the point where it’s a near autoloss. I think these can be addressed safely with proper building, and am loath to ban these prematurely to reward people not building around these. Similar to the other trend of people disrespecting Nidoking / Jynx, or the past trend of people complaining that tox / ml / bpass Umb was too good because they were allergic to running Steelix. While there is a world where it gets banned, I think we have to wait and see if the meta is incapable of adapting first.