I'm going to preface this post by saying that I have a lot of respect for the council for letting espathra actually play out in the meta before suspecting it. While a lot of people would have liked for it to be quickbanned from the tier or suspected much earlier (including me), I think that giving it time to develop its team styles and opponents to find its checks has let players scale the extent of its power much more accurately. I will be voting
ban on Espathra, but since my
last post on this pokemon, I have gained far more experience playing against Espathra and therefore have developed a different perspective on it. I'm also going to try to bring up points that haven't been talked that heavily about above, since a lot of the people have put forward really strong and good arguments and if I reiterated them that isn't really meaningful.
1. What actually separates Espathra from other sweepers?
At first glance, Espathra looks like it isn't too different to other sweepers in the metagame such as Raging Bolt and to a lesser extent Volcarona. All three of these pokemon boost the same offensive stats, and all three of them have a form of speed control to let them become bigger threats - Espathra with Speed Boost, Volcarona with QD, and Bolt with T-clap. But what separates Espathra's speed control is that it is far, far harder to stop it than for both the other pokemon mentioned. Volcarona is prone to getting doubled and killed before it can set up a quiver dance, and thunderclap can be redirected, shut down by psychic terrain, or outplayed on the 50/50s. On the other hand, if you threaten to outspeed and OHKO Espathra with things like Landorus or Regidrago, Espathra can stall a turn with protect, get a speed boost first, and then set up while being faster. On top of that, it can attack opponents with things like stored power while knowing that it will get more threatening by the end of the turn. The thing about this is that it adds an extra layer of passive speed control, which makes Espathra really dangerous as a setup sweeper because you can't play too slowly around it. While this is a very strong concept in a vacuum, the reality is that if this was all Espathra had, it would still be niche at best if these were its only qualities because it has extremely subpar stats. The opponent can often simply chip it down and trade against it with common pokemon like incineroar, gholdengo, or paonite. What actually elevates Espathra is its access to
Baton Pass, one of the most gimmicky yet frustrating moves in the game. This allows Espathra to serve as not only an incredible form of speed control for its boost receivers, but also lets multiple pokemon benefit from one singular boosting slot. The issue with this concept is that you can no longer just keep chipping down Espathra to eventually kill it, because it can baton pass its boosts for other pokemon to keep the momentum. The problem with this is that
it's not like the pokemon it passes the boosts to are bad pokemon; they are meta-defining threats that are already extremely powerful without having 2-3x their normal longevity and power. Overall, the reason Espathra is being suspected is because of its ability to snowball not only on its own, but with multiple pokemon using the same boosts.
2. Why is counterplay to Espathra considered uncommon?
This is something that I have thought about for a while, because it feels like it shouldn't be that hard to stop Espathra.
There are a lot of tools like covert cloak, taunt, phazing, encore, etc. which can help slow down the bird enough that it can be picked up by a teammate eventually. Taunt, Encore, and Phazing especially (via Roar/Whirlwind, will talk about Haze in a bit) all seem like alternatives that should be more common because of their ability to shut down other boost sweepers alongside working against Espathra.
However, I think that a huge reason that none of these are seen as often is the presence of Gholdengo in the tier. Good as Gold blocks all these status moves, and while these are all forms of counterplay that work against Espathra (a far more niche pokemon), they won't work against Gholdengo (a Tier 1 threat present on over 50% of teams). Because of this, using Taunt on your Incineroar or Roar on your Ninetales-A becomes much less common, because you can't stop the most common sweeper and can get much more value out of a different move. As for Haze, the move is not distributed widely enough for it to be mainstream, and when you use things like Murkrow then you don't only reduce the general value that you could be getting out of your pokemon slot, but also telegraph your counterplay to your opponent. You may have noticed that I haven't talked about covert cloak yet, and the main reason for that is cloak is a pretty niche item that isn't standard for most pokemon. Things like Ting-Lu who want to whirlwind espathra generally get far more value out of items like leftovers or grassy seed, Landorus who can OHKO Espathra is significantly better with life orb generally, roar Ninetales-A is much stronger with Light Clay, etc. Yes, cloak does provide a lot of utility and is great on pokemon like Tornadus and Okidogi. But the key issue with cloak is that it doesn't address a lot of the other issues like the incredible amount of utility from moves that Espathra teams will carry outside of fake out. If the sole reason you use up your item is for a slight improvement in an already niche matchup, you often aren't getting the most value from the item. Often times this causes people to get caught off guard by Espathra,
3. Is Espathra actually the problem here or is it Baton Pass?
This part of the argument had me extremely torn on whether I should vote DNB on Espathra or not, and is the main reason I'm posting this a few days after I got my reqs. The thing about Baton Pass is that it has made even pokemon like Eevee extremely uncompetitive, and Noelle brought forward Polteageist as well who also isn't exactly a meta threat. Now, we have Espathra abusing Baton Pass, which is yet again a low tier pick feeling banworthy because of baton pass + boosts. Moreover, Espathra is the only actually viable Baton Pass user in DOU, which means that the first real Baton Pass user in DOU is about to get banned: is that a Baton Pass problem? Without Baton Pass, as I mentioned before, Espathra is at best niche as a solo setup sweeper because of its stats being subpar. But there are a lot of inherent flaws with Espathra being in the meta itself. Firstly, the tools to stop Espathra are still uncommon and it can still be semi-consistent because of that. Secondly, as Eragon pointed out in his video above, the meta being super special heavy makes Espathra a lot stronger in the meta, and removing Baton Pass won't change that.
Yes, Espathra will be a giant matchup fish without Baton Pass. But because of DOU's state, it will still get that matchup more often than people might expect. A counterargument could be that you have to respect all relevant pokemon in the builder and Espathra is no different.
A typical build doesn't focus on JUST beating Espathra, but Espathra builds focus on beating all possible counters, which will result in your counterplay being much harder to use. Add on that Espathra techs aren't very flexible or usable outside that matchup AND that you often will need to get reads right either on lead or on the setup turns, and you can see why I don't want to risk keeping this pokemon in the tier.
4. Key arguments for DNB that I didn't talk about yet
A common argument I see that Espathra isn't unique when you say that it can outplay you despite your techs: so can every pokemon. The issue I've had with this is that a very important part of dealing with most setup sweepers is positioning in your counters. Bluntly put,
Espathra feeds on your switches and repositions. You cant feasibly pin this thing down (another common way to stop boost sweepers) because it can protect and then escape the pin because you will almost always not outspeed it anymore. On a similar road, the argument that not having techs into Espathra is your own fault is not really black-and-white, because to truly consistently beat Espathra, you need to commit more than just one item or tera type and call out when the opponent will position Espathra to try sweep (you won't have time to position unless your name is Murkrow). I have also seen the argument that Espathra not adding anything to the tier doesn't make it banworthy, but I would say that
Espathra actually harms the tier in a very meaningful way. The ratio of being easy to use and being good is incredibly skewed on Espathra, because any random person can pull up with this and beat a top tier player even if their understanding of the game is significantly worse. It reduces the skill gap required to maintain a healthy format, wasting a lot of time and effort for those people that spend hours to understand the metagame better.
5. A hypothetical meta without the ostrich
Bliss.
Conclusion (tl;dr for those who don't want to read through the whole post)
Speed Boost's flexibility as well as Espathra's ability to both sweep alone and pass the same boosts to teammates maintains too much momentum for common team structures to properly handle. In addition, Espathra answers are few and far between in DOU, with the most common sweeper in
just stopping almost all the counterplay. This causes the logical thoughts of "if I can't roar a Gholdengo with my Ninetales-Alola, shouldn't I run a different move that has better general use?" And your team just lost an Espathra answer. Baton Pass is a huge reason as to why Espathra is so annoying: Pokemon that already see high usage in tours like Gholdengo and Raging Bolt are not supposed to outspeed your whole team while also being twice as bulky. The thing is that banning Baton Pass doesn't invalidate Espathra's superb position in the meta, meaning it can still matchup fish and win without passing (see:
Madaraaaa vs Nails). Finally, beating Espathra is deceptively difficult even if you have tools, because if Espathra comes in on you when you are out of position the speed at which it wins the game often won't give you a chance to reposition.
Final thoughts
I personally do not like Espathra's niche at all. I think its really one-dimensional in its goal and doesn't really have that many unique ways to win, and multiple ways to win a game is a characteristic that I love about doubles in general. Despite being like this, it still feels so overly flexible because of the fact that it can come in any time it wants, and you kinda just have to be ready every single turn. I do wish that people ran other sets on this pokemon though, sets like opportunist as a counterteam or sash lumina crash as support seem like such underexplored and awesome sets that could be used. But no, this is what the bird is destined to do I guess. So far, I'm 99% sure this thing is getting banned and I'm definitely really happy for that. I do still have my eyes out for Baton Pass though, I feel like its such a volatile move and can enable some of the dumbest strategies in Doubles as a whole. Support or abusers of this move will only get better with the next generations, so we might need to take a look at how we view this move before its bar gets set too high.
Thank you so, so much for reading through this. It took me over 3 hours total to formulate everything and its midnight when I'm finishing this up, but I hope you enjoyed!
Edit:
Yes, I got reqs like 3 days ago lol
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Madaraaaa vs Nails 
Luisin vs Akaru 
One of many Zee Espathra paste OSDT Replays 
Tenzai vs Repeatt 
AIRedzone vs Yoda2798 
. Espathra teams can try to slow these down with cycling their fake out/follow me/taunt.
