Project Draft League Tiering

[Hacker]

With a new year comes a new initiative in the Draft League sub-forum: establishing a fully formed tiering council! This council will exist to tier every format offered in our 2025 circuit calendar, and each individual who has a say in tiering decisions will be annotated in this thread for accountability and visibility amongst the community. This thread will be used to post updates to tiers as they occur (a change-log) but please feel free to discuss any of the changes in the general discussion thread!

The tiering administrators and individuals responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of the official Draft League sub-forum's tier lists are Hacker and vmnunes. Any questions about the tier lists produced by the tiering council should be addressed to the individuals below, but may also be directed to Hacker if desired. Any tournament ran by the sub-forum that will incorporate any below tier will also be overseen by the below individuals (Draft Champions League will incorporate ORAS, USUM, SS, SV, and VGC for example):

SV: Scribble, King L5, GeniusX, PZZ, Techno, SoggyDoggySage
SS: Addison, SkyhorseTamer, hjkhj, PZZ, JimmyG
USUM: OdinRM, fortunate sun, Hacker, vmnunes, KCric12
ORAS: King L5, Professor Shuckle, sablolol, Tjb145, vmnunes
VGC: Mogo, trace, Lindwurm, Bananacrazy111, Lemurro
Ubers (National Dex): Nyx, Aberforth, Celestiial, vmnunes, Frito
National Dex: jscurf, gorex, SoggyDoggySage
Low Tier: OdinRM, sablolol, ultraplayer
DPP: Hacker, EndlessGadgets, jeronis

Alongside that, thank you to everyone who has contributed to our tiering. A list of our former tiering council members is below

Former Tiering Council

Tjb145, Habaduh, Feyy, Almighty Rye, 2playaLuffy, abriel, Venoo, SlickPanther, Hazv, Bash11, takuaa, TRowePrice667, JCMShadow

 

[Tjb145]

Winter Seasonal

The Winter Seasonal Draft Board can be seen here

We are kicking the year off with one of our biggest solo tour events. With the release of the Indigo Disk DLC last month, change of the metagame was inevitable. However, we felt that now was a good time to introduce further alterations that were fresh on the brain following last year's Draft Champions League team tour event unfold and how the SV draft meta was evolving. Without further ado, here are some of the key points I wanted to discuss about the approach to tiering for this event.

SV Draft Meta- A Brief Overview.

The draft meta we have in this generation is the most offensive meta we have ever seen. There are a plethora of reasons as to why this is the case. The introduction of terastalisation as a mechanic, the reduction of the pp on recovery moves, the removal of heal bell, I could give a ton of reasons as to why this is the case. The moral of the story is, this meta is very offensive and has a few key trends associated with it.

• Hazards and hazard control: One is widely abundant, the other is not. A lot of mons gained access to Spikes whilst a lot of mons lost Defog. For the old timers, the state of hazards in this meta is somewhat reminiscent of the current ORAS draft meta, just with the addition of Heavy Duty Boots if required. For the newer players amongst ye, I would recommend trying to secure elite hazard control to prevent over-reliant on the Boots we all know and love/despise but at the same time trying to give yourself access to those sweet, sweet hazards to those who are not quite in the same situation.
• Speed control/Natural speed: This is such an important aspect to have for any draft and generation 9 makes it an even bigger deal. With the metagame being faster than ever, it is important to ensure that you do not draft a team that gives the opponent freedom to run an attack boosting nature or to have greater bulk investment that could become crucial later in the game. However, taking speed for the sake of speed is a dangerous game, try to minimise exploitable speed gaps if possible and give yourself the best possible chance to win the offence onslaught. At the end of the day speed is key.
• Priority: Strong priority is everywhere in this metagame and it is borderline essential. As I mentioned earlier, speed is key but priority is a wonderful thing that can help in a pinch in instances where your speed may not be up to it. Having the ability to revenge kill key threats is sometimes the only thing preventing you from staring defeat in the face. A more offensive metagame makes living hits, particularly from setup sweepers that bit less likely and in a metagame like that, priorities effectiveness skyrockets!

These key aspects, as well as others that I may get into another time are what shape the draft metagame as we see it. The tiers we generate for our events emulate the metagame trends as we deem appropriate.

As a final point/ reminder for this section, Draft format is not the same as standard play. The ability of foresight of the Pokémon your opponent has access to leads to some key differences. Some Pokémon can be seen as too much for this format due to their versatility (eg: Dragapult) or can be seen as too overbearing and is deemed too forcing both drafting and prepping habits (eg: Zamazenta-Crowned, a recent addition to our banlist). Both of these examples are seen as healthy for the standard play metagame. The contrary is also true, where there are some Pokémon that are deemed ban worthy in standard play but are not seen in the same vein in draft. The best example of this is Espathra,sometimes all you need is the benefit of foresight and specific counterplay preparation to make an emu that can be so broken so middling.

New Toy Syndrome

The release of the DLC has brought the introduction of some new Pokémon to the format, as well as the return of some old friends with new toys to play with. This is always an exciting time for the player, but a time of uncertainty for people who tier for leagues or tours due to general fear of the unknown or the lack of time to truly dissect what every Pokémon might be capable of. There are always going to be decisions that you get wrong in early metagames (I don't think I'm going to forget about 13 point Annihilape anytime soon) so times like these are mostly about not being afraid to make mistakes and learning from them in hindsight. Here are a few highlights of these introductions that I would like to spend some time talking about, with some more of them appearing later on when it comes to the discussion of complex bans.

This is the first time that Darkrai has been made legal in a Smogon Draft event and it feels as though now is as good a time as any to introduce it into our metagame. Darkrai is the definition of powercreep catching up to a mon that was formerly seen on a pedestal, as its recent stint in the OU tier has shown. Unbanning Darkrai has become commonplace following the release of the DLC, and we felt that now was the time for us to join that movement.
One of the main beneficiaries of terastalisation that did not receive a complex ban for this event. This is a Pokémon that has not been well liked in previous metagames, with some people enjoying what it can provide to certain drafts while it is majority considered middling to terrible. Tera as a mechanic is of major benefit to Latias, as is the introduction of Draining Kiss to its arsenal, making it that bit more of a potent threat with the Calm Mind sets. This is probably the most talked about Latias has been in the draft metagame since the early ORAS days, and it should be interesting to see how it gets on in practice compared to what is hypothesised on paper.
Another major beneficiary of the Tera mechanic, especially with the introduction of Stellar type in The Indigo Disk. Leaf Storm +Stellar Tera Blast seems like a potentially potent combination for those who are ill prepared for it either with their draft and in play. Due to this,we decided to tier it slightly higher than most other places. This is due to a reduction of potential resources in 8 mon draft tournaments compared to 10/11 mon draft leagues play as well as a varying degree of player experience around these type of "anti-meta" Pokémon. This was a decison that I received questions on, and if people want to discuss this further with me I am more than happy to.
The boy with the long neck has made quite a splash since its introduction, and it has quite an interesting set of tools that could make it rather potent in the draft league format. Thunderclap is a majorly beneficial tool due to the current archetype of the metagame, especially with a lack of specially offensive priority in the metagame (the most common examples prior to this were Vacuum Wave Iron Valiant and Water Shuriken Greninja). The natural bulk and offensive prowess this mon provides would seem that it would thrive in the current metagame, but its flaws that including that low speed stat and high potency to easily bringable techs like Encore lead us to our pricing of 15 points, which we believe to be a fair reflection at this time.

A change in approach towards Terastalisation

Prior to the commencement of DCL, the idea of changing the policy of 1 Tera Captain to 2 Tera Captains with a 25 point budget was brought up by the tiering committee. This was a change that was positively received and subsequently implemented on a trial basis. This was deemed to be a success in retrospect resulting in its use for Circuit finals and its introduction for a Type A event for the first time. This should give greater flexibility in how coaches can use the mechanic, which should in turn produce a healthier, more diverse metagame.

The terms healthy and diverse are pretty ironic, as it led to us making another decision, this time about complex bans (ie: Pokémon that are not allowed to be tera captains.) It was made abundantly clear over the course of last years events that there were some Tera legal Pokémon that were overcentralising to the metagame beyond the key threats that were previously banned (if people have questions about these please let me know as I will not be addressing them here). For the sake of trying to maximise the current health of the metagame, a decision was made to reduce the current power level for these events and complex ban many of the top tier Tera captain threats observed in both the Summer Seasonal and in DCL.. These are listed and briefly described below.

This thing is quite stupid with Tera and wins too many endgames by itself, good riddance
I could honestly copy paste what I just said except this thing is even more versatile than Kingambit, a tera ban was well and truly deserved.
This mon became a major factor in both seasonal and DCL due to its sheer versatility and needing to cover both the choiced Tera Fairy sets and the alternative setup variations, causing many unhealthy headaches.
In the same boat as Enamorus except it was doing it by not even being Tera Legal in some cases. This Pokémon is really good with or without the mechanic, but with it is where the problems lie that we believe are best left banned for the time being.
This Pokémon had a quick rise to popularity in the draft format as a tera captain following its release and has not let up ever since. Tera allows for it to become a lethal breaker with very few switchins or alternatively a defensively equipped setup threat that becomes even harder to kill. Therefore we decided that it would be too unhealthy in the metagame we are trying to create and left it on the sidelines.
This mon has one tera type option and is still a force to be reckoned with. Initially due to the ruling around Ogerpon's legality in DCL we felt that this might be ok in the long run but it was decided that it was not worth trying to take this risk and the decision to complex ban was made.

On top of this, there was some Pokémon introduced to the generation 9 metagame via The Indigo Disk DLC that we felt vein as the aforementioned complex bans. As a result it was decided by the committee to complex ban them immediately.
A buffed Luster Purge and Flip Turn access make the mon naturally better, but the capability of increasing its offensively potency by use of double powered stabs or by gaining access to key coverage or power increase in coverage it may be lacking in a matchup due to Terastalisation was considered too healthy to allow for it to not be complexed right out the gate.
This mon is basically a slightly less potent but more versatile version of Baxcalibur, and that was not deemed something we deemed tolerable in this healthy metagame we are trying to create.
A Pokémon that has had issues with being a potent threat in the metagames it is legal in, we felt that the combination of Tera and its immense offensive potential would be of detriment to the metagame in the long term.
This mon seems to be a Draft league players dream on paper due to its stat distribution and wide array of options at its disposal. Its typing is naturally of benefit in this metagame, but the idea of introducing the potential this mon possesses from being able to terastalise was not one we believed to be of merit.
Due to its excellent speed tier, offensive potential, movepool and bulk Iron Boulder was always going to be considered a top tier, the flaw that is holding it back is its typing due to its weaknesses. Terastalising would remove this key flaw and would make it an overcentralising force to be reckoned with, a reckoning we decided to not let loose.
Duh

A huge thank you to my SV tiering committee GeniusX, 2playaLuffy, OdinRM, Almighty Rye, Habaduh, Dartrix - Joker and JCMShadow as well as to Nyx for all of the documentation support. All of your work is greatly appreciated!

 

[Princess Autumn]

Ubers
The second tour of our circuit is here. Being our first Type C of the year, it's the inaugural NatDex Ubers tour! Since this format will be incredibly different to our usual tours, I'll be outlining the reasonings for not only tiering decisions within this thread but also the differing draft sizes. I'd highly recommend reading the spoilers in order, the latter ones will reference previous ones. For those who want the tl;dr though:

Every player will be allowed an Arceus forme if they'd like one.
Drafts will consist of 10-12 Pokémon and have a budget of 200 points, with draft pools having 10 players each.
Revival Blessing, Hidden Power and Refresh are banned.
Z-Moves are banned.
Terastallisation is banned.

I'll be referring to the format as both NatDex Ubers and Ubers throughout, unless explicitly stated otherwise, they're the same thing. Please note that this is a format that has been tested across multiple leagues, it isn't something we've come up with on a whim.

Arceus, the glue of the metagame

Now I can already hear people's complaints about "fighting the same Pokémon every game" but at the core of it, this simply isn't the case. While every (legal) forme has 120 in each of its base stats and a locked item slot, they all play incredibly differently, and play different roles within the metagame. For starters, not every Arceus can reliably get away with running Calm Mind/Dragon Dance/Swords Dance etc. sets, whether that be due to their poor natural typing or, for physical sets, a lack of usable STAB moves. While every Arceus does get access to the same pool of coverage, it runs into the issue of non-STAB moves not being strong enough to forgo a STAB attacks, there are always certain matchups where this isn't true but it stands true as a general rule of thumb, it's normal to see Arceus running Judgment/a physical alternative in most games.

To add to this, Arceus is also the format's primary glue mon. While each forme's different weaknesses mean that they don't necessarily wall all of the same Pokémon, they are able to soft check a majority of breakers and set-up sweepers in the format, thanks to its access to moves such as moves such as Thunder Wave, Will-O-Wisp and Dragon Tail. Its plethora of support options allow it to be the defensive backbone of a team, if that's what the player desires. It's certainly not the best at this, in fact, it'd absolutely be banworthy if it was. Instead, it is a strong defensive backbone that teams can use to keep the numerous offensive threats on most teams in check. Formes with better defensive typings will obviously be better at this.

Example

Arceus-Dark will undoubtedly be better than Arceus-Flying defensively (in most match-ups) due to their respective weaknesses/resistances, Arceus-Dark is immune to Psychic, one of the most common STAB-types amongst Ubers, compared to Arceus-Flying which is both weak to Stealth Rock and Ice Beam, an extremely common coverage move available to most Ubers.

With a rough idea of what Arceus is able to do, I can imagine a lot of you wonder what the benefits of allowing a Swiss army knife of sorts are in general. Firstly, it turns every match-up into less of a situation where "my Ubers are better than yours, therefore I win". The innate ability to soft check most Pokémon on your opponents draft, and vice versa, adds a balancing element to Pokémon that otherwise race to set-up first.

The second key reason is a more ideological one. It'll be relevant to more than just Arceus so I'll put it in its own spoiler below.

How we ended up with the format that we have

Standard draft loosely mirrors OU, it allows Pokémon that OU does not, and in turn bans ones that it does, but it aims to keep a relatively arbitrary but similar feeling power level, with the aim of maximising playerbase enjoyment. In the same vein, a NatDex Ubers draft should aim to loosely mirror a NatDex Ubers format. We're taking a slightly different approach to Smogon's standard NatDex, and instead assuming that all Pokémon and moves are imported into SV, but not items and mechanics, because that's what's commonplace across the Draft community. Hidden Power is banned because most people in the Draft community agree that its best left in USUM. This is a decision made to appease our player base as a whole, just as how ADV OU complex bans Baton Pass to appease its player base. From this we then attempted to craft a Draft format centralised around NatDex Ubers. Any Ubers tier with Arceus legal has always led to it being on nearly 100% of teams, and the same principle should apply to a Draft format trying to mimic it. We explicitly did not aim to create standard Draft with a couple of Uber Pokémon added onto each draft, that's not an Ubers centric metagame, which is the point of Ubers. This is a format that aims to be centralised around Ubers, they should be the spotlight of the format, as its the only Draft format where they are legal.

Why Tera is banned

Tera, at a minimum, was always going to require an extensive Tera ban list, with all Arceus formes, Calyrex-I, Ho-Oh, Zygarde-C and Lunala. They all would otherwise be banned - it's akin to the Palafins and Iron Valiants of standard draft. The issue Ubers runs into is that the next tier of Tera abusers still becomes broken, the high variance in the builder just isn't something you can account for while having a cohesive build. This issue persists until you reach a power level where the best Tera abusers become your non-Ubers Pokémon. At this point, you have Tera Pokémon that are balanced, but it raises a new issue. These Pokémon are now able to go toe-to-toe with your high end Ubers, thanks to their ability to Tera, while the Ubers can't, they can escape a bad defensive matchup, or create a good offensive one, while the Ubers have no such tool to do so. It partly shifts the focus of the metagame onto the non-Ubers, which goes against our earlier stated tiering philosophy:

This is a format that aims to be centralised around Ubers, they should be the spotlight of the format, as its the only Draft format where they are legal.

For these reasons, we felt it was justified to ban Tera entirely, there are other more minor reasons but they didn't change our opinions, so I won't list them here for now.

Draft sizes

8 Pokémon Ubers leads to teams becoming too strong, or too constrained by points. There would either never be a reason to bring a Pokémon below your best six, or you'd end up with too tight a budget to have anything beyond 4 Ubers and 4 Pokémon below 5 points. 10-12 Pokémon allows for a larger budget while still making later picks more than usable. 10 coach draft pools also help with this, they allow us to maximise the number of legal Pokémon, while not overly favouring any singular draft position.

Banning of Revival Blessing, Hidden Power and Refresh

Going to run through these quickly, being able to revive Arceus formes, but also breakers such as Primal Kyogre, Deoxys-Attack and Rayquaza, which aim to go 1-1 every game so that their teammates can clean up, is broken. The trade off of drafting terrible Pokémon becomes worth it when they're able to revive significantly better Pokémon. Smeargle definitely makes this problem worse, love Smeargle.

Hidden Power's reasoning I outlined earlier:

Hidden Power is banned because most people in the Draft community agree that its best left in USUM. This is a decision made to appease our player base as a whole, just as how ADV OU complex bans Baton Pass to appease its player base.

Refresh is definitely the weirdest of these, it possibly could be fine, but is simply not something we've seen freed in any leagues running this kind of format. We didn't want to take any potential risks. As for why it's possibly not fine, Refresh enables multiple Arceus formes to reliably remove poison, burn and paralysis, some of the most reliable counterplay to them. It's most notable on formes that can run Dragon Dance 2 Attacks and afford to drop Recover. It can also enable Mono Judgment Calm Mind Arceus formes, while both are possibly too niche to justify a ban, we didn't want to take the risk of it potentially pushing formes like Ground, Fairy and Poison over the edge.

Why is THIS banned

I won't outline all of the banned Pokémon, at a certain point they become self explanatory but a few do warrant their own explanations,
It only has a handful of reliable defensive checks in the game as a whole, being Ting-Lu and Clodsire. It's able to tech for all its other checks with ease in a draft setting. This is coupled with its blistering speed tier, making it far too volatile.
Being able to eliminate Arceus with minimal ease kinda goes against the entire point of having Arceus legal in the first place. 130 Speed Encore with Shadow Tag will not be seeing the light of day.
It's one of the best breakers, cleaners, set-up sweepers and enablers. Not only does it hit incredibly hard, off a blistering speed tier, it also enables threats such as Flutter Mane, Walking Wake and Chi-Yu to wall break even harder than they already do.
Zacian-C is incredibly centralising, even with the nerfs it received in SV, it still ends up treading the line between balanced and broken. We didn't want to take that risk for this draft, especially when a majority of players haven't touched the format before.
MMY is incredibly strong, which alone isn't enough to ban it, but coupled with being one of the fastest mons in the format, and being able to set-up to live hits, deal even more damage or outspeed all Scarfers thanks to moves such as Calm Mind, Nasty Plot and Agility. Its natural power puts a tier above Mewtwo, which is still slower and has to take LO recoil to be able to dish out comparative damage, making it easier to revenge kill.
This thing is able to run offensive sets on both the physical and special side fantastically. There's very few reliable defensive checks, none of which are able to check both sets, from the builder alone, it becomes an almost coin flip as to which set you attempt to check, and even then, they can't deal with it running support options such as Taunt, Substitute or Will-O-Wisp. This alone would put it at the absolute top of the draft board, but its pushed over the edge with its equally viable defensive utility, thanks to its Fighting immunity in a metagame with a plethora of strong Fightings.

and why is THIS legal

These three tend to be banned in most Ubers draft leagues across the community, but from the testing we've seen with them, none seem to be too broken to justify banning. Arceus-Ground is absolutely one of the best Pokémon on the board, and of these three it possibly may be banned if we run this tour again, but as things stand, we believe it to be just about healthy enough to allow.
In generation 8, there was absolutely a strong argument to justify banning Eternatus. However, with the recovery PP nerf and the abundance of viable Spikers in SV, Eternatus runs into severe longevity issues on its bulkier sets and is easily revenge killed on its offensive sets due to the extra chip its forced to take in most games. It's still a premier threat, both offensively and defensively, but isn't close to broken anymore.
It's complex banned because this has been standard across draft for as long as Ubers draft leagues have existed. There's just no reason to remove it, even if it is a premier threat, since what it adds to the metagame is incredibly valuable.
These all are combined, allowing the drafter to use any of their formes. We felt that none of these were distinctly different enough to justify splitting the formes up and resulting with too many similar Pokémon. The most notable of these differences is with Palkia-O, it trades its item slot to be able to run a speed tie with Arceus. While this does seem drastic, this doesn't really change the prep you'd have by much, as all it forces is max Speed on Arceus if it wanted to speed tie Palkia-O, the defensive prep remains practically identical.
We chose not to combine the Deoxys formes as three of the four forms function incredibly differently. Deoxys is absolutely a budget Deoxys-A but Deoxys-Speed excels by being able to taunt a lot of +1 Speed Pokémon, or cripple them with Toxic/Thunder Wave while also being faster than all forms of removal. Deoxys-D on the other hand abuses its bulk to check offensive threats, and then Teleport out. The closest example to this in standard draft would be the Forces of Nature.

The tiering of Mega Evolutions

We chose to factor in opportunity cost when tiering Mega Evolutions, both relative to other Mega Evolutions, but also roles within the metagame. There are 7 (legal) Uber Megas, defined here as costing 21 points or more. These are the defining Mega Evolutions within the format, and by the far the most viable. Beyond this, we have the likes of Scizor, Alakazam, Lopunny, Diancie, Charizard-X, Garchomp and Aerodactyl, all of which fill various niches incredibly well, whether that be slow pivot, incredibly fast cleaners, Magic Bounce support or reliable breakers. Once you go below these, you run into Megas that may possibly be banned from standard draft, but are completely outclassed in an Ubers setting. The two key offenders of this are Latias and Latios. They have a dual typing of the two most prevalent typings amongst the Ubers, are slower than Arceus while simultaneously nor being bulky enough/strong enough to warrant being picked up given their item lock. Other Megas were tiered in a such way that if someone wanted to theoretically use them, they wouldn't be disproportionately punished for it.

I'll write a full disclaimer here, we absolutely will have mistiered some Pokémon, especially in tiers below 14, as most of them are simply not relevant enough to have any play for us to go off of.

A massive thanks to Aberforth, abriel, Celestiial, Fc, Frito and vmnunes for helping tier, as well as KingofKrook for also helping with this writeup.

 

[Hacker]

Hey all,

We've changed the structure of the tiering council going into the new year alongside the upcoming Circuit Playoffs and Draft League World Cup. A few notable changes are:

• Tjb145 has stepped down from being our tiering leader, me and vmnunes have taken over his position
• We have downsized how large our groups of people tiering each tier are to 6 people maximum. This is so we can work much more efficiently
• Each tier is now primarily tiered by people actively playing these tiers in tournaments or elsewhere

The tiering councils for all of our tiers that take place in DCL are:

Tiering Councils

SV: JCMShadow, Scribble, King L5, GeniusX, PZZ, Techno
SS: Addison, SkyhorseTamer, hjkhj, PZZ, JimmyG
USUM: OdinRM, fortunate sun, Hacker, vmnunes
ORAS: King L5, Professor Shuckle, sablolol, vmnunes
VGC: Mogo, trace, Lindwurm, Bananacrazy111, Lemurro

If there any questions about tiering please contact me, I hope everyone is doing well!

 

[Hacker]

Good morning,

From now on, we plan to be publishing our voting that we do in this thread. The voting for our Circuit Playoffs and DLWC tiering is right here.

Alongside that, in these updates you can generally expect us to talk about mons that have notable changes in tiering. Such as...

Tera

We have changed our rules and regulations for tera a little bit going into Circuit Playoffs and DLWC. We have now made it 2 or 3 tera captains, with a 28 point tera budget. The entire point that we ended up choosing to go through with this is because it should produce more variety and help give middle priced tera captains a better fighting chance against the high priced ones, seeing as this would help people be able to pair strong middle priced tera captains with each other. Alongside that, another point of discussion is that this should help give players more options to handle opposing tera, as being able to do something like tera a middle or low priced mon to handle opposing tera should be easier to accomplish with more options of pokemon to do this with.

We chose to free tera Blaziken in DCL... and it didn't get drafted a single time. We still think it is a great threat and thus are placing it at 17 points with the hope that somebody will be willing to give it a try to see if it is priced appropriately or not.
Zarude is super nuts with tera and has been skyrocketing in costs over the past few tournaments. In the first edition of DCL, this guy was placed at 15 points and it currently is 18 points. This rise in cost has mostly just been because of its ridiculous 68% winrate that it has shown in the last DCL due to its really good stat spread with strong bulk and speed, alongside the pure versatility that this mon displays. I think it is a mon that eventually we could end up tera banning, but for now I think 18 points is a nice and respectable price for it.
We chose to drop Palafin from 19 to 18 points. This is mostly because of the huge commitment you need to take with Palafin by having to switch it out for it to do anything, alongside being generally hard to draft around because as a top pick it doesn't really offer you much. This being said, its still a great mon with a few really good sets alongside priority being invaluable in the very volatile meta that SV is. I think pricing it at 18 points is correct.
Abomasnow is another mon that has performed really strong in DCL, with it being near the top of our kill leaders with a whopping 19 kills. This guy has generally been drafted more and more, and it has been trending upwards for a good amount of time now. We believe that its current price is much more accurate to how good this thing is compared to other low tier grass types.
Urshifu Single has been getting picked less and less as time has came on as a tera captain, and Urshifu Rapid has seen an uptick in usage with a good amount of community sentiment of it being at least equal to Urshifu Single, but potentially better too. I think that this is mostly because of Urshifu Single's relationship with tera, where anything can turn into a fairy type and give it trouble, but Urshifu Rapid's typing is much more harder to check defensively even with tera as a tool to check it.
Nobody drafts these guys anymore really. Raikou and Infernape both has suffered from power creep turning them into more middling Pokemon. Torkoal has recently been getting outclassed as a sun setter to Ninetales because of its speed alongside access to super strong utility like Healing Wish and Hypnosis.
I needed a little help writing for Meowscarada and Greninja, so I got some help. Thanks Scribble for the lengthy writeup

Meowscarada and Greninja

Meowscarada and Greninja have been priced similarly all generation, but for the first time, Meowscarada has risen above Greninja. As the meta has developed, their roles have diverged and become more specialized to their unique strengths. Greninja primarily uses Battle Bond and acts as a wincon, whereas Meowscarada focuses on revenge killing with Protean. However, base Greninja has issues consistently pulling off Battle Bond sweeps. As such, Greninja has started being drafted as a Tera Captain to give it a much appreciated boost in power to enable its Battle Bond sets. Since Protean Greninja sees no benefit from Tera, its base price decreased while its Tera price remained the same.
Ironically, a major reason for base Greninja’s price decrease was how vulnerable it is to being revenge killed by Meowscarada. In fact, almost the entire meta is vulnerable to being revenge killed by Meowscarada due to its nearly perfect offensive movepool. The community has overall started to highly value Meowscarada’s consistency in offensively checking the majority of meta threats, leading to its price increase.

Special thanks to Scribble, JCMShadow, King L5, Techno, PZZ, Tjb145, and GeniusX for the help with tiering!

If there are any further questions about this, please message me on discord as "doormoney". Good night

 

[Hacker]

Here is our voting board for ORAS Cup III.

There are not a lot of changes for this tournament. Here are some of the more notable ones though

Togekiss, Mega Manectric, Tentacruel, Qwilfish, and Cobalion are all current staples of the tier and are constantly drafted for their price and the things they provide. They have been moved up a point to reflect this
Rain has never been seen in recent gameplay so we have opted to make the main rain users cheaper.
We have moved a decent amount of pokemon down that basically never get drafted.

If there are any further questions, do message me. Good luck everyone in ORAS Cup III!

 

[Scribble]

Time for the second edition of the SV tier shift update post, this time for the upcoming Spring Seasonal!

The first thing to address is the Tera Captain system used for Circuit Championships/DLWC, which is a 28 point budget for 2-3 captains. We decided to keep this system as we felt it was balanced and gave enough incentive to draft mid tier Tera Captains that didn't see much usage before.

As a direct result of mid tiers seeing more usage, some hidden gems emerged and their prices were bumped up accordingly. While this write up won't go over every change we made, it will explain the rationale behind the most relevant/interesting ones. The full voting board can be found here.

Tera Hydrapple is the current talk of the town, receiving a massive price increase from 9 points to 12 due to its showing in DLWC. While it had a low draft rate, its performance in the games was far above similarly priced Pokemon. I recommend checking out some of Team Canada and Team Rest of the World's Hydrapple replays to understand why it got such a significant price increase.

Tera Zarude was a late meta discovery that ended up being one of the strongest Pokemon in the metagame. There were some doubts about its performance when it could no longer be paired with other Round 1 worthy Pokemon like Iron Valiant, but community perception of Tera Zarude's strength has only grown higher, so we increased it to max price. I wouldn't be surprised if Zarude ended up being Tera banned eventually, but we didn't want to go that far without seeing it at max price in a non draft-creation format tournament.

Tera Sinistcha got a +2 point increase last tiering update, and it still performed extremely well in DLWC both with Tera and without, boasting a 64% win rate overall. Everyone on the tiering council agreed it was due for another price adjustment, with both non-Tera Sinistcha and Tera Sinistcha receiving a +1 point increase.

Oh how the mighty have fallen...Kingambit used to be Tera banned, and now it's slowly falling down the tier list. Tera Kingambit completely flopped in DLWC, with only 6 being drafted and as of writing this post, only has a 30% win rate at that. We felt it was no longer worth 17 points and gave it a -1 point decrease. On the other hand, DLWC saw non-Tera Kingambit be experimented with to decent success. The council was split down the middle if regular Kingambit should also increase, but the status quo ended up being maintained. Maybe in the future the gap between Tera and non-Tera Kingambit won't be as big.

These old meta threats dropped the ball in DLWC and just don't see the usage or success they used to. All of them got a -1 point decrease to hopefully make them more viable options again.

Same as above, but I'm not sure if these guys were ever real threats.

Interestingly, teams with Lando-T performed significantly better than teams with Great Tusk. Lando-T has nearly a 58% win rate in DLWC, while Great Tusk is struggling with a 48% win rate. Win rates don't tell close to the full story, but they're a pretty good sign that a Pokemon is underpriced, so we bumped base Lando-T up 1 point to match its Tera counterpart.

Smogon Draft has decided to implement what's known as the SoggyDoggySage Tax System, where Sage's favorite underpriced low tiers end up getting price increases due to a huge increase in demand. Seriously though, both Rotom and Lapras add way more to a team than other Pokemon in their price range, so they got price increases.

Same as above, but not specifically due to the SoggyDoggySage Tax.

It's crazy to think we live in a world where Latias is potentially better than Latios, but as time goes on, it seems more likely that this is the case. The main reasons most people prefer Latias now are its access to Healing Wish and its greater bulk. The combination of Healing Wish + dual screens with a solid speed tier makes Latias an excellent support piece for many offensive structures, and its bulk allows it to run Weakness Policy wincon sets more consistently than its counterpart. Maybe one day Latias will overtake Latios in price, but for now, Latias got a +1 bump to match Latios.

When's the last time you saw these mid-priced mons drafted? I couldn't answer this myself, so they all got a price decrease of varying degrees to maybe make them more appealing.

Special thanks to King L5, Techno, SoggyDoggySage, PZZ, GeniusX, and yours truly for helping with tiering!

 

[Scribble]

Since the SV Ghosting tournament received a custom avatar prize, we decided a small tiering update to reflect current meta trends was appropriate. The voting slate was small and the amount of actual changes is even smaller, but nevertheless here's a brief writeup of the changes we made and why. The full voting slate can be found here.

Tera Hydrapple got a massive price bump for spring seasonal, but it's clear that the value it brings to games still wasn't reflected in its price. It's strong, tanky, and has one of the best abilities in the game. Its only real flaws are its typing and its Speed, the former of which is solved by Tera, and the latter of which is what keeps it legal. The dust seems to be settling in the 15-16 point price range for it, but it ended up at 16 points for a total of a +4 increase.

Pecharunt is dominating in SV OU, and it seems like that trend carried over to SV Draft with how drastically its pick rate increased. It's arguably the best Toxic spreader in the game, is a blanket check to physical attacks, and it even provides two important type niches that drafts aim to grab (spinblocker + Toxic Spikes absorber). While its limited movepool, weakness to Tera Poison/Steel, and also weakness to tech items like Clear Amulet and Covert Cloak keep it from rising to the top of the board, it got a small +1 bump on its own merit.

Gliscor has historically been a Pokemon much worse in Draft than standard play due to how easy it is to pack Ice coverage for it, but Tera Gliscor sheds this issue. Sometimes it feels like getting one turn wrong vs it lets it heal back to full. We've also been seeing some success with double dance Swords Dance + Agility Tera Gliscor sets that can reliably sweep endgames. Tera Gliscor got a +1 price increase, but regular Gliscor stayed at its current price.

Palafin and Tera Ogerpon are priced near the top of the draft board, but sadly just haven't seen consistent success in a long time. They're kind of similar: both are incredibly strong and have amazing STAB moves, but they're limited to just 1 STAB with no way around it (Palafin being Tera Banned, Ogerpon being Tera type locked). This leads to both Pokemon often running into bad matchups. If an opponent happens to have great Water/Grass resists, then Palafin/Ogerpon respectively will really struggle in ways that other top tier Pokemon don't. Palafin and Ogerpon are still perfectly viable, but their consistency issues make them unpopular and both got a -1 point decrease to reflect this.

Both of these guys are some of the highest value options at the end of the board, and probably have been underpriced for quite some time. Dusknoir's a reliable spinblocker with a good movepool that lets it contribute in a surprising amount of matchups, while Carbink has just about every utility option you could ask for in a budget pick. Both got +1 point increases since we feel they were undervalued and will still get taken at higher prices.

And those are all the changes we made! Like I said at the beginning this was only a minor update since the Spring Seasonal update was only a couple months ago, but we wanted to make sure a tournament with a prize attached had an up-to-date board.

Special thanks to King L5, SoggyDoggySage, PZZ, GeniusX, and yours truly for helping with tiering! (Techno abstained from voting this time around due to irl obligations).

 

[OdinRM]

Tiering update - SV Low Tier Cup III

The standard SV metagame has developed quite a lot in the last year, so naturally a major shake up for our Low Tier format was in order to keep up with how the generation is being played. Among these rule changes we also decided to reshape most of the tier list since this is a format that doesnt see enough experimentation due to the lack of competitive representation. Updated Tier list can be found HERE

Number of captains + Tera Tax implementation: following the footsteps of SV Standard, the same ruleset will be used for consistency. Pokémon will be taxed differently If they want to use tera, teams can have 2-3 tera captains with a 28 point Tera budget.

Bans and Tera Bans: While sinistcha did not prove to be broken last year, its a mon that has rapidly become one of the more consistent performers of the generation, specially when It has access to tera. As far as LT goes it is by far the best spinblocker on a format where the hazard setters are consistent and the spinners are okay at best which can dangerously warp the power level of hazard stacking offensive drafts, so It has received a precautionary ban. Tera Entei was a pretty controversial addition last year and while it did not perform to expectations it was oppressive enough in prep that led it to be unhealthy, receiving a Tera ban.

Top tiers brought back: Last year some LT regulars were kicked out of the format in an attempt to lower the power level which caused a destabilization. With the format being reworked, two strong attackers in Gardevoir and Heracross are introduced with a tera ban this time, while Hisuian Goodra is also making a return to match the power level of the top tiers.

Tera Captains on the rise: Toxtricity and Okidogi both got an increase after their performances last year while Shaymin had its Tera ban lifted and placed at 19 points. Along those, pokémon like Barraskewda, Dudunsparce, Meloetta and Moltres also saw an increase in their Tera price.

New additions to the format: With the goal of keep experimenting with this format in mind, newcomers like Enamorus-T, Munkidori and Lucario are being added with Tera bans. Among other newcomers there are defensive pieces like Mandibuzz, Milotic and Snorlax that in past generations were banned for being too hard to take down but in SV the power level being as high as it is allows for these pokémon to be kept in check more easily.

Special thanks to the LT Tiering council: Haildras, jscurf, SoggyDoggySage and sablolol for the help with the fixes this time around!

 

[Scribble]

With DCL 3 just around the corner, it's time for one of the most significant tiering shifts for SV Draft in a long while. We paid a lot of attention to DPL Season 9's results in particular, and we noticed two major trends: the gap between early and late R1 Pokemon was rising, and a lot of defensive-leaning balance structures saw way more success than before. So, we decided to do some significant price increases to account for these meta shifts, but we also still made plenty of drops of Pokemon with minimal usage. The full voting board can be found here.

Rises

Iron Valiant has long been the consensus #1 overall pick on the SV board, and Tera Tornadus-Therian isn't too far behind nowadays either. Their best trait is that both of them are very easy to draft around. They can fit on so many structures and pair with all kinds of offensive Pokemon in R2/R3 to the point when we felt there was a significant enough gap between them and the rest of the board to break the max price limit. We are increasing both Iron Valiant and Tera Tornadus-T from 19 to 20 points to be truly reflective of the value they bring to drafts.

Pretty much everything said about Iron Valiant and Tera Tornadus-Therian also applies to Meowscarada. The only reason why it isn't joining them in the 20 point tier is it hasn't had a stay in 19 points yet, and we didn't want to jump all the way to beyond the old max price for it. Still, Meowscarada got bumped from 18 points to 19.

Alomomola's had a long reputation of being a very reliable lose condition in draft, but it's clearly beating the allegations in the current meta. Flip Turn this generation turned it from a complete momentum sink to an incredible slow pivot, and we've seen a lot of more offensively invested Alomomolas with Assault Vest to get around its passivity while still having really solid bulk. Not to mention its access to Healing Wish, a very desirable move to have in SV draft. It's probably been underpriced for quite some time, but it only really started rising in popularity recently. We've bumped up its price from 8 to 10 points as a result.

We gave Pecharunt a small bump in the last tiering update, but clearly that wasn't enough. It's just incredibly good at what it does and is super obnoxious if you don't prep specifically for it with an item or Tera type. It blanket checks virtually every physical attacker in the game and enables a very strong hazard stack gameplan. It almost forces a significant amount of Heavy-Duty Boots usage on its own. While it's still exploitable, it takes a lot of effort to actually exploit, and Tera can fix those issues almost entirely. As a result, we increased regular Pecharunt from 12 to 13 points, and Tera Pecharunt from 12 to 14 points.

We've seen Terapagos get picked earlier and earlier as the gen as gone on and it's consistently put up strong results. So strong to the point when it's actually the #1 overall Pokemon results wise when aggregating the stats from DPL 8, DPL 9, DCL 2, 2024 Circuit Finals, and 2025 Spring Seasonal Top Cut (the most prominent high level post-DLC SV draft tournaments. DLWC not included due to being a draft creation format). We felt it was a small step above the other 17 pointers, so we gave it a bump to 18 points.

The ORAS titan has seen a surprising resurgence in SV draft over the past year, but it's not actually that surprising when you take a closer look at some of the meta picks. Namely, most of the popular speed options: Meowscarada, Greninja, Darkrai, and Roaring Moon. What do they all have in common? They're all weak to Fighting, and Keldeo got access to the most powerful Vacuum Wave in the game in the SV DLC. It took a while to catch on, but Keldeo is an excellent anti-meta pick since it's genuinely really difficult to answer. Many revenge killer options are threatened by Vacuum Wave, and it's hard to consistently check defensively thanks to its raw power, setup potential, and ability to hit both both defense stats. It's seeing usage in both its base form and as a Tera captain, so we gave both forms a price increase. Base Keldeo went from 12 to 13 points, and Tera Keldeo went from 12 to 14 points.

It wouldn't be a tiering update without a cheap spinblocker getting a price bump, but here we have a repeat offender: Rotom Spook is basically a meta staple right now. It consistently gets drafted more than every Pokemon in its price range, is actually brought to games, and actually performs. We gave it another bump from 5 to 6 points, but it honestly wouldn't surprise me if it went higher as the meta goes on.


We lowered Mew's price just a bit too much to the point when, despite its low usage, it provided slightly too much to a team when it was drafted. It does still see some amount of play, but not super frequently, so we didn't change anything dramatic. Base Mew just got a slight bump from 10 back to 11 points.


Drops

Tera Enamorus has struggled in the past year. It's consistently gone negative, and that's just not a trait you want in a 19 pointer. Most other tournaments price it at 18 points now, and we are joining them. It's still a strong option, but it's very difficult to draft around, unlike all the other Pokemon in its former price tier.

Entry hazard control options in SV draft are very, very limited. There's only a handful of splashable options, and the rest range from good but niche, mid, or just terrible. While we can't change the options on the board, we can try to make them better by decreasing their price. We highlighted Excadrill and Hatterene as additional hazard detterents that were probably priced out of ever getting drafted, so we dropped them both. Base Excadrill went from 12 to 10 points, putting it on the same level as Donphan. Its Tera counterpart also dropped from 13 to 12 points. Base Hatterene went from 11 to 9 points, while its Tera counterpart went from 11 to 10 points. Tsareena, Toedscruel, Hitmontop, and Hitmonchan all received a 1 point decrease to make them slightly more appealing to draft. I doubt those four will change the meta, but hey, it's something.

(Also, we apparently had a tera tax on ? No idea why, but we removed it. Base Brambleghast is still 5 points though)

There wasn't any reason we could think of why non-tera Urshifu-Single-Strike was priced higher than non-tera Urshifu-Rapid. We decreased it from 15 to 14 points, meaning the Urshifu formes are now the same price with and without Tera.

Woah! That's a lot of Poison-types. They all also don't see much use, and if they do get drafted, it's mostly just to say that the draft has a grounded Poison type to try to avoid people bringing Toxic Spikes into them every week. All of them got a 1 point price drop so maybe they can actually be happily drafted rather than just being taken via obligation.

+ more!: Many other Pokemon got a small price drop strictly from seeing little to no usage. Rejoice, Slither Wing fans! Maybe this is the tournament when it will finally pop off.

Special thanks to King L5, GeniusX, PZZ, Techno, SoggyDoggySage, and yours truly for helping with tiering!