Hey all, I want to make a post to advocate for a
ban on Charizard-Mega-Y in ORAS 1v1.
I believe that Charizard is an extremely centralizing Pokemon with an abdundance of different movesets that is virtually impossible to consistently beat without dedicating more than one slot on your team to beating Charizard unless you run a Rock-type, which is a gamble in and of itself because there are next to no 100%-accurate Rock-type moves. The point being: you are either unable to consistently defeat Charizard in the builder without dedicating at least 2 slots to beating it due to its wide spread of possible movesets, or you are unable to consistently defeat Charizard in the game due to the inaccuracy of Rock-type moves. Even if you take enough countermeasures for every Charizard-set in existence with you, you can't garantuee a victory because you can't be sure wether you are facing a Charizard-Mega-X or a Charizard-Mega-Y, because these 2 pokemon run vastly different movesets and have next to no shared counters/checks, with the exception of inaccurate Rock-type moves. (not to mention that Charizary-Mega-Y often times has good odds to bail itself out of wrong picks resulting in matchups it is supposed to lose by simply flinching with Air Slash) I believe that this, alongside the extremely high usage in ORAS 1v1 tournament play, makes the Pokemon broken enough to warrant action being taken against it.
The next point I would like to address is what I believe is the correct course of action to take against Charizard. I think that there are three possible ways to deal with Charizard:
- Ban Charizard
- Ban Charizardite X
- Ban Charizardite Y
The issue I have with outright banning Charizard or banning Charizardite X is that Charizard-Mega-X is a, in my opinion, healthy component in the current ORAS 1v1 metagame that keeps otherwise broken threats from going haywire, a prime example being Victini. I believe that Victini would be potentially even more broken than Charizard is in the current metagame, if we were to outright ban Charizard or Charizardite X. Charizard-Mega-X is both Victini's best counter and its best competition for the best physical Fire-attacker in the metagame. With Charizard-Mega-X gone, Victini would be able to defeat almost every Mega, a core element of the generation and a pool of pokemon found on just about every team, making it potentially just as centralizing as Charizard.
Charizard-Mega-Y meanwhile, had a 150BP STAB & sun-boosted Fire-move and a Base-SpA stat of 195 which lets it nuke an incredibly huge portion of what could otherwise be potentially viable and healthy additions to the metagame, heavily limiting the variance of Pokemon you can pick from when teambuilding, alongside, although I believe that goes without saying, an incredibly broken Pokemon in general due to it's massive offensive output. Alongside this, it also has great special bulk that lets it tank a vast amount of other strong nukes the tier has to offer, such as Hyper Beam Porygon-Z, modest Hydro Cannon Greninja and Psychotic Boost Deoxys-Speed. Add the fact that you are forced to make an educated guess at preview to pick your correct Charizard answer to this, and dealing with Charizard is way harder than dealing with any other Pokemon in the entire metagame. (Seriously, I can't count the amount of Slowbro's and Manaphy's I saw dying to Charizard-Mega-Y clicking Solar Beam on 2 hands anymore)
You may wonder what the difference is between a Charizard-Mega-X + Victini ban, and a theoretical Charizard-Mega-Y + Manaphy ban would be. The answer is simply the stability of the tier. Charizard-Mega-X has always been the driving force of the metagame, and the metagame has consistently developed around it. Then Charizard-Mega-Y became popular, and both forms started developing more oppresive sets. Banning Charizard-Mega-Y lets the metagame actually adapt around it and become stable. even if Manaphy becomes a lot better, Charizard-Mega-X is still there doing what it's always been doing; being the driving and defining force of the metagame.
Henceforth, I believe that Charizard-Mega-Y is the more unhealthy element that needs to be addressed to make the tier better, and I believe that only the Charizardite Y should be banned.
In the next section of this post, I would like to offer my opinion on a couple of the points
DEG made in his post on Charizard in ORAS 1v1 earlier.
Let's get two things straight, ORAS is a top heavy metagame, so anything to diversify the meta won't work since there's more than 10 top mons, and we have to ignore future metas while working on a current fix.
Diversifying a metagame shouldn't ever be the goal of banning a Pokemon. The goal should always be to make a metagame healthier, and you're not ever going to accomplish that if you look to make the metagame more diverse or, even worse, ignore the consequences banning a certain Pokemon has. If banning one pokemon makes another Pokemon stupid broken, that is not in the slightest the 'fix' to the metagame that a ban is meant to be.
I have this opinion that Charizard alone isn't broken, or unhealthy and ORAS has deeper problems, and it's just a metagame that is different from other metagames. Fire-types being so different in ORAS is annoying to check, but Charizard alone isn't annoying to check; see: Charizard and Victini which are two fire types that may have different checks (Gyarados-Mega losing to Victini for example). ORAS being top heavy doesn't also help the metagame, checking both Charizard and Manaphy is annoying, so is checking both Manaphy and Victini, so is checking Mawile/Gross+Fire or Mawile/Gross + Manaphy. The root of the problem in ORAS isn't Charizard but it's the way the meta is played. It's also the oldest competitive metagame without any significant changes so it was bound to get stale.
What deeper problem is there? Fire types are as good as they are because of Charizard. You're mentioning a bunch of the most relevant threats in the metagame, but yet none of these come close to Charizard in terms of centralization. You address "deeper problems" in this paragraph, but in the same paragraph, you say that the very epitome of these problems, Charizard, which is virtually impossible to reliably beat without dedication more than 1 slot to it while building, is healthy. That doesn't really make a lot of sense to me.
Being afraid of cascade reactions is nonsense. We should never look into the future because nobody will win. I can also say "Oh if Zard Y gets banned then why would you use X, it's just a less customizable Victini and will be worse than Victini". How do you know that banning X would break the metagame but not Y. It is true that banning one of them will reduce the other viability by a lot. My "future" opinion says Zard Y without X is literally an A- mon, and Zard X without Y is an A / A+ mon pushing both Victini and Manaphy to S territory. My future opinion and everyone's future opinion is wrong, because there's no way telling what may happen.
As said before, I believe that it is stupid not to think about the future of the metagame when making decisions on wether or not to ban a certain Pokemon. Sure, you can't predict exactly what happens in the future, but I think that you, as a council member, are supposed to have enough metagame knowledge to make an educated estimation on what would happen in the event of the ban of a certain Pokemon and act accordingly to make the tier the best it can be.
Both Charizard forms have a lot of Charizard checks + you can also "deter" the Charizard click. In most of the games, you don't really have to setguess Charizard since they share a lot of counters (Heatran, Diancie, Gyarados, Tyranitar, Greninja, Archeops, PZ is set dependant, Mega Altaria, Garchomp to name a few). I am aware that Charizard is starting to adapt to only some aka using Endure or literally some anti-heatran stuff but it still isn't overbearing and doesn't warrant panic.
With all its set versatility, mega charizard lacks reliable counterplay. You being able to stack checks on a team isn't a valid argument on why zard isn't busted either. Charizard can tailor it's moveset towards beating almost all of its counters, if it wishes to do so. Brick Break beats Heatran, Diancie has to hit Diamond Storm and can still lose even then (
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen61v1-1656874740,
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen61v1-1240546990-a469vwq7fwqwfkv2z9xljzyulg9y9d7pw), Gyarados usually loses to Impish Wisp, nailing it down to a 50/50 + hitting Edge at best, Tyranitar can lose to all of Impish Wisp, Counter and Brick Break while also having to hit Edge, Greninja can lose to Charizard-Mega-Y, Archeops has to hit Head Smash, Porygon-Z can lose to Charizard-Mega-Y, Altaria-Mega can get flinched and even if it doesn't, it still loses if Charizard-Mega-Y runs Toxic, Garchomp can lose to Counter. (Here's a small Charizard set compendium containing the sets I am talking about:
https://pokepast.es/2385c64dc0975a5f)
Now I am aware that you can't run all these sets at once, but the point is that it
can. Are we really saying that a Pokemon that has no 100%-secure countermeasures and can run just about any set it wants on a lot of teams is healthy? There are more than enough examples of Charizard winning games it shouldn't by virtue of having a tailored set.
Tl;dr: Ban Charizard-Mega-Y. I believe that this course of action would improve the metagame a great deal as well as nerf Charizard's unpredictability on preview, making Charizard-Mega-X a more healthy threat to deal with. Having both Charizard's around in this metagame jas become a major problem because Charizard has enough raw matchup-wins and set variance (as it can easily afford to run non-standard sets, too) to beat just about any Pokemon in the metagame.
Tauros
Blissey
- 
S- -> A-/B+
A- -> B
A -> B+
B+ -> B-
B+ -> C+
B+ -> B
A- -> B-
B+ -> C
-> A-
C+ -> B
A- -> A
