After an internal vote, the Linked council has decided to suspect test Electric Terrain as a linkable move!
Speed is everything in competitive Pokemon, and especially so in a hyper offensive meta. This fact was made clearly evident at Linked’s revival at the beginning of this month, where Booster Energy’s initial legality pushed various Quark Drive-mons to dominate the early meta. While there were other contributing factors at play, threats like Iron Boulder and Iron Valiant were incredible at snowballing with uncontested speed tiers. Iron Moth was also cartoonishly good at breaking anything not named Heatran, with an nigh-unwallable Acid Spray + Fiery Dance set.
Booster Energy was quickly and justifiably banned to prevent such free boosts to Paradox-mons, as well as Drought and Electric Surge. When Sun teams still were deemed overpowered, both Sunny Day and Electric Terrain were restricted from being Linked moves, hampering both playstyles’ momentum. Sun, while still viable, is now manageable. However, many in the player base indicated on the Linked tiering survey that the council’s response to Electric Terrain may have been an overcorrection, with the archetype having more viable counterplay than Sun teams did.
Rillaboom has emerged as a meta commanding presence, able to reset the field with its ability against Electric Terrain reliant teams. Priority is generally strong against the better Quark Drive-users, as well as Raichu-A. Dedicated ETerrain setters are also nowhere near as adept at setting terrain and grabbing momentum as the best Sun setters were. Regieleki can only use Volt Switch to pivot, and thus thud into Ground types when trying to bring in their breaker or sweeper. Kilowattrel has U-Turn and is decently fast, but is frail. Zapdos and Mew alsobhave both Electric Terrain and U-turn, but both are slower and therefore more prone to being either KO’d or Taunted before setting.
With all this in mind, and despite remaining devisive, the majority of the council has been moved to reconsider our earlier decision, pending a suspect test. The purpose of this test is to leave it to you, the players, to determine the fate of Electric Terrain.
Do you believe manual Electric Terrain teams are balanced and have enough adequate counterplay as to not become overbearing? Do you see these teams as a healthy presence, helping to stabilize the meta, with Iron Valiant more able to check strong meta threats like Kingambit, Dragapult and Zamazenta, and even provide a counterbalance to team archetypes like Tailwind + Rain? Will Electric Terrain being linkable push Quark Drive and Electric types like Raging Bolt and Iron Moth too hard into broken territory, potentially justifying individual tiering action if ETerrain is unrestricted?
The instructions to participate in this suspect are as follows:
- Create a new account on PS. You do not have to follow any specific naming convention, but your suspect account must have never played a game in SV Linked before this suspect test went up or you will not receive valid requirements (resetting W-L does not count for this—the account you use must never have played Linked before the test, full stop.)
- You can use /rank to check if your alt is allowed to get requirements. Whenever in doubt, type /rank and it will tell confirm if you are eligible or not
- At any point on your new account, use the command /linksmogon on Pokemon Showdown! You will receive instructions on what to do once you run this command.
- Double check that you're listed as a voter here! If you aren't listed as a voter despite having valid reqs, please contact dhelmise, Giagantic, Chessking, or any other OM Staff member.
- If you have any questions about this new process, feel free to PM dhelmise!
Because this is an unban suspect, the threshold for reintroducing Electric Terrain into the Linked metagame is >50% of the total votes being unban votes.
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Electric Terrain + U-turn Zapdos and CM + Moonblast Iron Valiant is a decent core, as Val likes extra speed, but again, you could just use Tailwind to be even faster, unless you really need a strong Tbolt.
RBolt likes some extra power with Rising Voltage to goob Unawares like Skeledirge, but it can also just utilize Calm Mind to not be bothered by Rillaboom. A lateral trade, honestly.
Jolteon could utilize Fake Tears + Thunderbolt to muscle past Glowbro and some other things, but it doesn’t really need extra power on its STAB, as its best way to force progress is by hitting the Electric immunes/resists with Fake Tears + Alluring Voice.
Moth and Crown are strong enough out of the box that using a Terrain setter is a wasted opportunity cost. The also both have better speed control options in Agility (or Flame Charge).
Raichu can do some stuff with speed and STAB Psychic or Surf for Tusk, Clod, Ttar, but it’s also very priority weak. The other two guys are just bad mons, also weak to priority and having bad STABs not suited for the meta.
