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Birds of a feather, we should stick together, I know
I said I'd never think I wasn't better alone
Can't change the weather, might not be forever
But if it's forever, it's even better
Following its rise in usage and performance in recent tours, the DOU Council has decided Espathra is deserving of a suspect test!
Despite a rather subpar statline, Espathra fulfills a unique role due to its combination of Speed Boost, Calm Mind, and Baton Pass. This allows Espathra to pass boosts in Special Attack, Special Defense, and Speed (along with optionally Defense if using Grassy Seed with Rillaboom) to a teammate such as Gholdengo or Primarina to benefit from. While Baton Pass strategies are typically lackluster in doubles from being too slow and exploitable, Espathra however is quite effective, requiring only a turn or two to set up for it to achieve a threatening number of boosts.
Espathra is deceptively bulky, as Speed Boost allows it to invest heavily in bulk, while still moving before opponents to reduce incoming damage with Calm Mind, or Baton Pass before being targeted. Meanwhile, the aforementioned option of Grassy Seed with Rillaboom softens physical blows, with Intimidate from Incineroar also providing defensive cover. Both these teammates also importantly provide Fake Out, helping to safely create the one turn Espathra needs to start snowballing. Together, the two can even cycle Fake Out by switching between each other while Espathra Protects. Stored Power provides another angle to Espathra besides Baton Pass, as after boosts begin to rack up, Stored Power and therefore Espathra itself quickly becomes a threat on its own. Gholdengo is probably the strongest beneficiary of Baton Pass, as a strong spread special attacker immune to Fake Out and phazing, but other special attackers such as Primarina, Raging Bolt, or more, can also take advantage of Espathra's boosts.
As a Pokemon reliant on boosts, either for its own benefit or for a teammate, Espathra struggles if prevented from being able to set up successfully. With Espathra teams typically being built around supporting and benefitting from it, neutralising Espathra will usually also cripple the team as a whole. Calm Mind provides reliable damage mitigation on the special side, but Espathra's physical side is more vulnerable, particularly if not running Grassy Seed. Pokemon like Chien-Pao, Incineroar, and Roaring Moon all threaten serious damage against Espathra with their STAB attacks while being naturally immune to Stored Power, with Roaring Moon also outspeeding +1 Espathra and having Tailwind to outspeed it beyond that. Espathra's reliance on Fake Out support means Pokemon immune to it can cause problems; Gholdengo can set up itself or threaten with a super effective Shadow Ball, Dragonite can use Extreme Speed to hit Espathra before it uses Baton Pass no matter how high its Speed is, or (Covert Cloak) Tornadus can impair Espathra with a Prankster Taunt. Phazing such as Whirlwind from Ting-Lu can force out Espathra or a non-Gholdengo beneficiary and remove their boosts. One last option to deal with Espathra is Trick Room, turning its Speed boosts against it and allowing practically any Pokemon to move before it or the Pokemon it Baton Passes into.
As usual, 60% of the vote must be in favor to ban Espathra.
NOTE: THIS TEST WILL BE USING THE NEW SUSPECT PROCESS!
The instructions to participate in this test 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 DOU 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 DOU before the test, full stop.)
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 myself, or a member of staff.
If you have any questions about this new process, feel free to PM me or post here!
The requirement to vote in this suspect test is a COIL value of 2980(using a B value of 5 - you do not need to worry about this).
The suspect laddering period will begin <t:1774656000:F> and the deadline for getting requirements is <t:1775433600:F>.
Additionally there will be 2 live suspect tournaments in the Smogon Doubles Showdown room. The winner of each of these tournaments will qualify for suspect voting, and should reach out to me, or another member of staff so we can verify and add them to the voting pool.
Suspect Tournament Times <t:1774713600:F> <t:1774814400:F>
To the uninitiated, the choice to suspect Espathra may seem random, brash, or unnecessary. However Espathra's had this day coming for a long time, having caused a decent amount of trouble in the tier for two years now and obviously completely breaking singles formats since the start of the generation. The bird has always been lurking in the background, an ever-present threat to the metagame that has recently seen enough usage to warrant this:
Espathra usage stats through the year in OSDT, Derby, Teamballo, EPL and Ladder Tour
| 44 | Espathra | 55 | 2.65% | 61.82% |
OSDT Alone
| 42 | Espathra | 50 | 2.65% | 60.00% |
These numbers might seem low but considering that Espathra has the highest winrate of any pokemon with significant usage this year and its nature as a matchup fish/cheese strategy I think we can lay the bird to rest and doing so would improve the metagame immediately. But allow me to recall this demonic bird's history in the tier, how I unearthed it and why it took so long for it to become a serious problem. Or, rather, recall how Espathra has always been ban-worthy, and has simply slipped under our noses while greater metagame developments took place.
DPL X was my first real teamtour, being a lowly 3k slot on Akaru and SMB's ducks team. I was hungry to prove my potential, and looked everywhere for potential ways to innovate in the format. Archaludon was clearly broken to me but very unsolved in the early DLC metagame, a little too slot and a little to vulnerable on the special side. Developments in the singles metagames still had a decent hold on me, and I remembered the very brief era of OU featuring Espathra setup teams, and found it was an easy way to fix Archaludon's only exploitable flaws. The team made it's debut against a very unfortunate Val16 after never losing a test game, and Espathra was officially introduced to DOU. This team saw a few more games in that DPL and a few games in other tours such as OSDT and PSPL and was solidly successful, eventually prompting the first suspect of Archaludon after it and other cheese teams flooded ladder for a bit. This Espathra structure was commonly cited in that suspect thread as the main pain point for players in respect to Archaludon. Well this team was built by a low elo noob who'd barely managed to go even in sv slot 3 of DPL so it wasn't as optimized as it could have been and Archaludon failed to get banned, with few top players beign interested in optimizing Espathra out in favor of optimizing pao offense in SCL or Arch-sini later that year. However the groundwork had been laid, and for the next year Espathra would continue to make dotted appearances in tournament and ladder games while the tier's top brass worked on solving pao, ting-lu, snow and archaludon compositions. A variant with sylveon was developed and used by a few players in this time period, but it never caught on too hard due to not being as oppressive as Archaludon.
Sealife would also spread Espathra to natdex alongside Astro Nation Shoe during the concurrently running natdex ladder tour, where I also contributed to the fray of Espathra teams that would lead to a swift and popular quickban in that tier after just a couple months of passing boosts to Mega-Gardevoir. This paled in comparison to the stage Nails was about to put Espathra on, however.
SCL V brought many surprises and among them was the big dumb bird making the biggest stage DOU has to offer. This game wasn't really close and set off alarm bells for a lot of people, such an egregious cheesing happening in a tour of this calibre by a pokemon long known to be problematic was unacceptable, bringing us to now. In the time since this game Espathra has exploded into its own archetype with a littany of support pieces and pass targets all boasting different counterplay and checks. Espathra has become the highest winrate pokemon of anything with more than 1% userate in tour play in 2026. It has continued to seep into the tier and win games , even when it has no right winning them against players that theoretically are prepared for it. To illustrate this, let's look at some replays where Espathra looks too strong.
Luisin vs Akaru
Espathra faces off against lostbox sun, a mix of Hyper Offense and setup and simply beats down on it with utility + damage mitigation
Luisin vs Repeat
Repeat tries to call that Ting-Lu will deter Espathra lead and gets it wrong, Incineroar prevents Ting-Lu from resetting the baton pass setup and wins before repeat gets to set up any of his gameplan.
Ratpacker vs Troutinspace
Trout tries to lead Ting Lu into Espathra, gets immediately forced out by Rilla + Landorus and Espathra gets in freely and passes out before Ting-Lu has a chance to phase/damage it and Gholdengo Sweeps
One of many Zee Espathra paste OSDT Replays
Notable because Gholdengo got passed to, died, and Espathra swept with its own boosts on second entry anyways. Good showcase of the style's resilience by virtue of having such solid and basic supporting pieces.
Tenzai vs Repeatt
Repeat tries to set early trick room to out-offense the Espathra setup but taunt on Incineroar shuts it down and puts him too far behind. Boosted bolt stat-checks Lando-I. one wrong turn and the game is over.
AIRedzone vs Yoda2798
Redzone opts out of espathra lead and supports his gholdengo with just the baseline support of the team, leaving the bird to come in later and clean the game out after sufficient progress is made.
Schister vs Pigwarrior
Espathra gets forced out early by overwhelming pressure from zapdos-dragonite but manages to find space to get back onto the field mid-game and gets a successful pass off to Kommo-O, showcasing the flexibility of gameplans the structure has.
It is exceedingly clear to me that Espathra, while having a common gameplan among all variants, is not linear and is flexible and resilient against common counterplay. It only takes 1 or 2 turns to get in and scale out of control and this can happen at any stage of the game. Still, it's not invincible, often KOed or forced out through various means but it is so straining and varied that I have to encourage voting ban. A lot of the high-level games where the bird loses are often due to misplaned gameplay or surprise factors that out-cheese the Espathra as well, further showcasing the degenerative effect this pokemon has on gameplay in this tier.
As the person who first unleashed Espathra on the tier, it's time to leave it behind and push the tier towards more honest and skillful gameplay. The only people who benefit from Espathra being in the tier are the lucky souls that land games where they can cheese strogner opponents who weren't prepared enough for being hyper-cheesed. Everyone else gains nothing from reducing the tier to this support slop archetype , and it certainly doesn't leave a good impression to prospective new players of the format. Please vote ban, free me of this sin.
qualified instead of having dinner ggs, been playing more DOU because of OSDT and I gotta say I hate this emu and the playstyle it represents with the passion of a hundred suns. boost spams are always a little bit degenerate, but the synergy Espathra gets for free with Rilla and the speed with which it snowballs out of control is overwhelming for many teamstyles to deal with reasonably, as was seen in the Madara vs Nails replay. Similarly snowbally threats like Archaludon which were determined to be too much for the tier still didn't get the opportunities to just start setting up at a moment's notice the way Espathra does. I'll be voting ban on the bird, and good riddance.
I am not voting in this suspect. I have no dog in this race, and I do not think it's fair for me to skew the vote in either direction when it doesn't and will never affect me. That being said, I went through the trouble of getting reqs anyway, hoping to play against some Espathra players and get a better idea of how it feels to both use and to play. I plan to do this multiple times to get the best picture of this Pokémon's matchups as possible, but despite only having completed 1 out of my 3 planned runs I've decided to just write this now, as I feel like I've seen enough and my opinion won't be drastically changed by my later runs (I will still finish them and will edit this post if I find something worth adding to this conversation).
My stance on Espathra
Do I think Espathra WILL be banned? Yes. Espathra teams are pure unapologetic cheese, and because people view it as something cheesy that takes no skill to win with it feels better to just remove it instead of building teams playing in a way that better deals with it. Regardless of whether or not Espathra is broken, it is annoying, which in a suspect test is even worse than being broken. Something can be overtuned but have interesting counterplay and skill expression that makes people want to keep it around, but if a Pokemon is annoying? Even if better teams or plays could be made to deal with it, people simply don't WANT to learn the matchup because it's not fun. I'm not going to make any comment on whether or not this is a good way to go about voting, this is a children's video game and the primary objective is to have fun + like I said earlier in the post I don't care either way, but it's something to keep in mind.
Do I think Espathra SHOULD be banned? Now this is a much more interesting question, and to answer it I'm going to talk about Polteageist.
The closest thing I can think to relate Espathra to is Shell Smash Polteageist guy from last generation's ladder. This team is something that's stuck in my memory for a long time because of how deceptively difficult it is to play into it. Back in Kartana meta there was a particular ladder player who I'm going to call Polteageist Guy because I can't remember his name and all the replays of this team were purged. The team uses Mr. Mime's specific role compression of having all of Fake Out, Follow Me and Wide Guard to enable Polteageist to get off a Shell Smash and either Stored Power through your entire team or pass those boosts to an Expanding Force Necrozma or Eruption Heatran in the back. This looks like a shittily build gimmick team you would see on 1100 on the ladder, but because of how deceptively flexible the team's game plans were and the fact that the person playing it was a relatively solid player by ladder standards, they ended up staying relatively high on the ladder. While there obviously is counterplay in the form of moves like Haze, Roar/Dragon Tail Dark-types, Prankster Encore + another terrain, and so on, these were really uncommon and hard to fit on teams during this specific era of SS (Late Kartana meta), forcing you to learn how to outplay with the tools you have in order to win games.
Now you may be wondering what this has to do with Espathra, and the point I'm trying to get at is that when I look at and play against Espathra teams I see a lot of parellels between it and the cheese strats you would come across last gen... and the gen before that.... and the gen before that. Baton Pass and Stored Power combined with Fake Out and Follow Me support allow Espathra to have flexibility in it's lines depending on what its fighting. There is counterplay like Covert Cloak in combination with Roar and Taunt, opposing setup, Dragonite, and so on, but these options seem to either be things that are either hard to fit in SV or require much more finesse to use against a good Espathra player than the user would originally think. My question is really just what separates Espathra from every cheese strat that has literally ever existed, both in this generation and past ones?
All of the things I've seen commonly cited as reasons Espathra is broken either actually have nothing to do with Espathra specifically, but rather the Pokemon around it, or can be said about any cheese strategy thats existed in past generations:
"Espathra passing to Gholdengo and being supported by strong supportive pieces makes it too difficult to stop its setup"
Then your problem actually has nothing to do with Espathra, its with anything that can Baton Pass + Setup and fill a similar role. Espathra being wheelchaired by Incin/Rilla/Gholdengo/Lando can be done with anything that gets a speed and special attack boosting move and learns the move Baton Pass, nothing that Espathra specifically is doing contributes to this talking point.
Additionally, I don't believe you. Fake Out is easier to answer in Gen 9 than it EVER has been before with Covert Cloak and Tera Ghost (balanced mechanics), and the Fake Out pieces in this gen have been directly nerfed compared to last gen to make them less capable of providing value outside of Fake Out. With how high the power level of this format is the more resources you dedicate to supporting the Espathra the worse your team will be if your opponent out-offenses you or finds a way to deal with your setup in a unique way you didn't think to cover for. Espathra teams cannot dedicate the level of support needed to make sure their shitmon is not instantly blown up by the offensive power of this format and still have a team that's good into everything, or even a solid chunk of the things they could reasonably face.
"Baton Pass makes Espathra's lines and game plans too flexible"
Then ban Baton Pass.
"Espathra adds nothing and not banning it only benefits Espathra players"
A pokemon doesn't need to add anything or benefit anyone to be not banworthy, otherwise we would've banned Shuckle and Weak Armor Armarouge by now. The response to cheese has always been to fit more counterplay onto your teams and play better to utilize that counterplay, and I have yet to see convincing arguments for why that doesn't apply here other than not liking it
"If a team doesn't have a dedicated way to stop Espathra, it becomes a nightmare"
So does every Pokemon ever. If you don't have a check to a Pokemon you lose to it. Pull up to an SV game with no Ground resists or no Gholdengo answers and you're going to get blown up, same applies to Espathra. This is not inherently unhealthy this is how cheese (not even cheese this is just how Pokemon in general works) has always worked.
"Espathra can outplay/ourprepare you even if you have techs for it"
So can most setup Pokemon. Setup Pokémon have never been answerable by just bringing a move or bringing a Pokemon, otherwise they wouldn't be good. You don't just put a Wood Hammer Rillaboom on your team and automatically never lose to Tapu Fini, or it wouldn't be a good Pokemon. You can't just bring a Landorus and automatically win against a Calm Mind Raging Bolt. You have to play well to position those counters and deny your opponent setup opportunities, whether that be through aggressive play and reads or strong positional play and use of disruption options like Fake Out and Taunt. Getting outplayed by Espathra isn't evidence that it's broken, you just got outplayed, and that's okay.
I'm not saying all this to call SV players bad at the game or to act like I understand this tier any better than anyone else, I just genuinely do not understand what makes Espathra different from the cheese strategies that have literally ALWAYS existed and will always exist.
The only real compelling argument I can think of is Espathra is winning tournament games and other strategies aren't. While I don't think tournament games are the end all be all of whether or not a Pokemon is broken (There are plenty of replays of it losing to the exact things I've talked about like offensive pressure and positioning hard techs to beat it, and players are not immune to just getting outplayed or unlucky even if it is a tournament game), but even if I do just take this at face value I don't see that as evidence that Espathra should be banned.
From what I've played Espathra is a Pokemon with PLENTY of hard techs and bad matchups to counter it, and while Espathra can tech their team to matchup fish and be strong into some counters, it can't have good matchups into all of its counterplay at the same time, and will still have games where it rolls a bad matchup or loses to a team with multiple soft checks... like every other setup strategy ever.
My Suspect Runs + Games against Espathra (will be updated later) I'm aware these replays matter less than actual tournament results but I'm not putting myself through this 3 separate times for nothing
My first suspect reqs run was done with a Ting Lu + Dondozo team. This wasn't done intentionally to counterteam Espathra (I genuinely just found the archetype interesting and wanted to learn it), but the team I used does happen to have a good matchup between Covert Cloak Ting Lu, Unaware Dondozo (which I later changed to Oblivious anyway) and Inner Focus Extreme Speed Dragonite. I played 2 Espathra teams in my entire run and won both times: https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen9doublesou-2569313684?p2 won with the Covert Cloak Taunt hard tech + paonite generally being good into these teams https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen9doublesou-2569295569?p2 almost lost because I didn't play around Tera properly, didn't actually have much to do with the Espathra at all
[all other runs are still in progress, will be edited later]
For my second run I decided to use an Espathra team myself. 1 played 1 Espathra mirror and won (I did lose to a team that had Espathra on it but it was never sent out https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen9doublesou-2569422883-difxos4jathwj9mkb9q4ybn0yso0nu5pw won with more proactive positioning and aggressive play
just got reqs, didn't run into a single espathra the whole time. laddering was pretty easy too since loading ursaluna just feels like a free win.
I don't have much to add to the espathra argument but I do agree it should be banned since it does often cut out skill expression and makes many matchups come down to a fish (some teams like typical snow kinda just autolose for example).
Here's the team i used have fun: someone thought i was chris lmao
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Madaraaaa vs Nails 
Luisin vs Akaru 
One of many Zee Espathra paste OSDT Replays 
Tenzai vs Repeatt 
AIRedzone vs Yoda2798 
