After intense deliberation with community members and within our council, we have decided to ban Dynamax from 1v1. Due to the nature of 1v1's game play, Dynamax has seen almost ubiquitous usage. This is an issue because Dynamax takes away the movesets of Pokemon, streamlining the available movepool of all Pokemon to 19 or less Max Moves (not counting Gmax Moves), which has created a metagame that can only reward those who can utilize these 19 moves the most effectively. Game states, which previously required careful strategy and planning, now revolve around clicking a button and mindlessly attacking to gain boosts. Gimmicky passive strategies that rely on 50/50s, like Substitute and Weakness Policy, are also heavily focused upon due to the nature of Dynamaxing, which also inhibits set and strategy diversity by an egregious amount. Dynamax stifles the importance of most other mechanics from the metagame, because as stated, only Dynamax and their Dynamax moves can counter opposing Dynamax users reliably, which is dissimilar to mechanics like Z-Moves and Mega Evolutions, who could easily be fought against by regular Pokemon using regular moves. Banning the current best users of the 19 moves would not fix this issue, as the next best abuser would simply take their place, so the metagame would now be comparably weaker but still utilizing the core strategies of the Pokemon before it.
This will go into effect ASAP, including the monthly leaderboard and active 1v1 tournaments. Thank you to Alakazam for helping me write this, and thank you to everyone for voicing your arguments about this over the past two weeks.
This will go into effect ASAP, including the monthly leaderboard and active 1v1 tournaments. Thank you to Alakazam for helping me write this, and thank you to everyone for voicing your arguments about this over the past two weeks.