all right, it's time for me to bring something to the table that i've been thinking about for a long time. we've had an entire year with no tiering action whatsoever and this meta is still unsatisfactory in many ways. broken threats such as primarina and alomomola rule the tier, and zap-king-lu is running rampant with no answers to it whatsoever except for all the answers there are. what to do about this scenario? the answer is obvious: we must unban arena trap and shadow tag. this is my thesis statement.
power creep has not been kind to these abilities. dugtrio may have been a legitimate threat in gen 6 or 7 or whenever the fuck arena trap was banned, i forget, but its damage output and speed tier are noticeably lacking in modern metas. it's outsped by meta staples such as dragapult, deoxys-speed and jolteon, and can do nothing against several common threats like chesnaught and dondozo. at -2, a scenario in which dugtrio often finds itself for what i hope are obvious reasons, it fails to even 2hko heatran in grassy terrain. what a loser! honestly i might even use wugtrio over it
relatively less affected by these problems, gothitelle is nonetheless plagued by a series of plagues that plague it. first of all, kingambit exists, even though it shouldn't. gothitelle has absolutely nothing against kingambit except for tricking it a choice item, and who would ever do that? you'd have to be a real dirtbag to pull off a move like that. have some decency. second of all, darkrai is legal now and can easily seduce gothitelle with its brooding and mysterious charms and easy access to cigarettes. third, ting-lu can wall anything gothitelle can do except for tricking it a choice item, and who would ever do that? you'd have to be a real dirtbag to pull off a move like that. have some decency. and last but not least, ou staple roaring moon can easily outspeed and ohko gothitelle with its powerful knock off, and gothitelle has no recourse against this. if there were some sort of mechanic that could allow it to change its type, maybe gothitelle would have a better time in these matchups, but fortunately there's no such thing (and even if there was, it would surely be banned)
i should also note here that wynaut, the best pokemon in the game by far, is not legal in this generation. thus, we have nothing to fear from it after a shadow tag unban unless it can afford a plane ticket to paldea, and air travel prices are only going up. i do have my reservations about trapinch, an arena trap user that's historically been way better than dugtrio due to its superior speed and power, but we can eat that bridge when we come to it. perchance.
let's go over some calcs: [remember to paste calcs here before posting]
furthermore, adding trapping abilities into the game has serious benefits. it punishes teams that switch a lot, which is something that no good pokemon in svou can probably do. this is good because i don't like it when my opponents switch. let me hit the thing in front of me! i clicked the super effective button and should be rewarded for it. in the anime there were limited amount of switch-ins a person could do especially the challenger, but since we can't implement that as part of our ruleset because of the tyrannical ou monarchy, our only solution to make the game more like the anime's ruleset (which is official and therefore far better than our fan-made one) is to unban these abilities. there are numerous unhealthy pokemon that become much easier to deal with if they can be trapped by arena trap, such as pecharunt, gholdengo, and gliscor
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ok back to the essay. trapping has counterplay now that it's never had before. for example, you can run known viable item shed shell, because we all know that free item slots in svou are so abundant that you can just slap whatever on anything with no downside. you can also become immune from trapping by turning into a ghost. not tera ghost or anything, i mean turning into an actual ghost because your mon got trapped and fucking died
lastly, the april fools' sprites for dugtrio and gothitelle don't match up well against the modern meta. gothitelle is just the classic scribble gag. don't get me wrong, i do appreciate the scribbles and i think they should comprise a good number of sprites, but it's not often that i look at one and actually go "hah that's funny" unless it's really poorly drawn. and dugtrio is minions. now everyone knows that minions are objectively the funniest thing to ever exist, but we already have a minions joke. that's morpeko's whole deal. why do we need two sets of minions? gru only needed one set and he got plenty done with em
so in conclusion, i think an unban of these perfectly balanced and competitive abilities is long overdue and will have many beneficial effects on the meta that i'll think of later. if you still aren't convinced, then just read the first letter of each paragraph. and then go back and read the whole post because i know you skipped to the end looking for a tldr. i worked hard on this, shame on you