Proposal DPP Snow Cloak

[Excal]

Current DPP evasion ability policy is complex banned in an unintuitive and suboptimal manner. In order to preserve Froslass, a not very good Pokemon, we have Sand Veil fully banned and Snow Cloak banned on Pokemon who don't have it as their only ability. This means while Mamoswine can't use Snow Cloak, Froslass and Glaceon can. This ruling has caused confusion for new DPP players and it doesn't make sense to uphold anymore. We should fully ban Snow Cloak, which should be lumped in with evasion clause. I feel we should act for the following reasons:

1. There is still cheese potential with Froslass hail teams, using movesets like Sub/Twave/Confuse Ray/Ice Beam or Spikes > Confuse Ray, which although very far from broken can take games out of players' hands in an unhealthy way
2. The current rules are nonsensical and set a bad precedent. We should not have the luxury to maintain flawed rulings yet be extremely rigid with retroactive old gen tiering changes
3. Similar to Baton Pass, people will always be able to exploit unhealthy/cheesy mechanics to larger extents as time passes. I believe this can happen with Snow Cloak, as hail teams have had significant optimization in recent time and will continue to become more popular

Tagging OGC Leaders + DPP Council: august Star M Dragon DeepBlueC BIHI mael

 

[ABR]

There is no upside to preserving lass yet tons of downside - both by rules and actual gameplay of the tier. Please do the good thing and remove it.

 

[BIHI]

skill issue

 

[johnnyg2]

The best solution is just to mod the game so that snow cloak doesn’t have an evasion boost but still blocks hail damage so you don’t have the nonsensical solution of banning Froslass and glaceon. Cleanest solution. Note that no Pokemon are vulnerable to hail that have snow cloak, but cacturne could be allowed under the same idea.

(I’m not naive enough to believe that y’all could actually do this, but we can’t have nice things)

 

[Eeveeto]

I prefer to go the opposite way and allow Cacturne, Gabite and Sandslash to be used in DPP OU, just like Froslass and Glaceon.

 

[Laurel]

As discussed on discord, I’m against this ban. Froslass fulfills a niche as a suicide spiker — there are not many spikers in DPP to begin with. Jirachee used a team that showcased Froslass’s ability just a few years ago.

While Froslass’s niche is small, it is more commonly used as a spiker or even trick lead than as a cheese mon. Not to mention with the popularity of Tyranitar and Hippowdon, Snow Cloak is hardly a problem.

I believe Froslass is also the only ghost-type with access to spikes, and as spin is the only way to remove hazards in DPP this is a very interesting niche.

 

[mael]

not posting as the council, just my personal input

i have no strong opinion (yet) but saying that there is no downsides to it is wrong, considering that froslass provides something really unique outside of hail as a ghost spiker with decent speed and people have been utilizing that. we saw froslass as a spikes setter at least in the last 2 spls and it is used outside of hail on ladder and other tournaments too. there's some really fun ways to tweak super offensive teams with froslass and it patches up a thing or two quite nicely. i'm generally in favour of getting rid of uncompetitive nonsense but this here does come at a cost and hail has not proven to be a problem (yet).

also you must consider people really stupid if you think that for anyone "snow cloak is banned on pokemon that have other abilities" is too complicated to understand. if someone genuinely has problems with that then arguably they should have more problems playing a game as complex and cognitively challenging as pokemon.

 

[AndViet]

as someone who's played dpp ou 13-14 years ago I have an opposing opinion. I think the rules should stay as is, to say froslass is just cheese tactics and not that good is just cap. as mentioned above frosslass is the only ghost mon that learns spikes (it's a very good suicide lead).

simply put its not hard to beat cheese tactics with frosslass, sandstorm is extremely popular with ttar and hippo. frosslass can't do much to an opposing ttar who has access to pursuit. if you wanna talk about "flawed ruling" lets ban jirachi lol, no but srsly there's other things in dpp ou that should be looked at. I dont think this is an issue.

 

[Emeral]

you def dont get my support for that

 

[SFG]

Strongly against this ban too, agree with what Mael / Laurel said

 

[Le Don]

When you're forced to use 2 Ice types that take *2 on rocks and one or two spinners, imo you're already throwing in the builder. Dugtrio isn't even anymore in the tier to remove these annoying bulky Steel types for Froslass. The Ice Queen is already hard to make work as lead so leave it alone.

So :

 

[Conflict]

LEAVE FROSLASS ALONE!!!

 

[mael]

Given that Froslass outside of hail is healthy and has a legitimate niche and Hail is not a common problem as of now the council has decided to take no action. Additionally, based on the feedback of the community, it appears that the majority are strongly in favour of not taking any action on Froslass. Should Snow Cloak become a problem we will revisit the topic.