Okay so a little late with this one but nearly finished my requirements so here goes. I find it strange how a few months ago during the baton pass suspect barely anyone voted for gothlette trapping to be brought to suspect, and yet here we are months later and people are calling for a ban. Trapping is hardly a new strategy that's emerged in the last few months but suddenly there's enough concern to bring it to suspect. I personally believe the tier is perfectly balanced and suspecting existing Pokemon/abilities within the tier will only make things less balanced, I would also like to suggest that the TL's look outside of the tier to previously banned Pokemon for the next round.
Diglett
Yes it's fast but it's not exactly sweeping teams or forcing 50/50's every single battle. It's greatly versatile in that it can be a sash lead to setup rocks, it can add a little more power with a life orb/sub variant and if you're really hip you can run banded diglett.
Sashrocks lead diglett serves as a great check to abra, although if that sash is broken it's pretty useless against sashbra. There are the same users every thread who complain about abra being broken, after encountering a few of these people on the ladder and watching tour battles the reason is,
they run abra weak teams! Diglett is not Pokemons answer to abra but if you make a few right plays with diglett you can trap it and outspeed it or weaken it to a point where a priority move will faint it.
A little less relevant than the previous point but also notable, diglett can bypass common taunt users like mienfoo giving you more or less guaranteed rocks. This variant is also serves as a great revenge killer, as I said with abra, you can also revenge chinchou, elekid and plenty of other Pokemon.
My preferred diglett set, which I've seen in much greater abundance than the sash set thus far on the ladder is the life orb set. EQ + Sub + Sucker Punch + SR/Filler is a great pawniard lure so long as your opponent isn't aware of the set. It also allows you to hit a little bit harder since base 55 attack is pretty weak, even by LC standards (literally the same as foon). With the increasing popularity of this, at least as far as I've seen, the sucker lure seems to be a bit of a grey area since pawn can easily spam attacks to prevent the substitute from going up.
The points I've made so far are highlighting the great potential of diglett in Little Cup but I feel its flaws certainly reduce how much of a threat it is. Most teams carry at least one choice scarfed pokemon which is almost always guaranteed to outspeed diglett. Yes you can make the play of switching in on a volt switch, but if you overpredict you risk your diglett being OHKO'd by an attack. Priority and speed are necessities on any well built LC team so a common problem is that after successfully revenge killing/trapping a weak pokemon, diglett is easily revenge killed itself. I have already mentioned the pretty lowly base 55 attack stat which means that barring super effective attacks/attacks on things like abra and gastly, diglett isn't really posing much of an offensive threat. I get that people are concerned with the trapping aspect rather than the offensive one but I am in the opinion that this flaw is significant enough to make it competitive as opposed to "uncompetitive" (buzz words). I doubt it really needs explaining but the base 25 defence is also a massive drawback, as I said there are a lot of priority/scarf abusers in the tier that are more or less guaranteed to beat it every single time.
Some that come to mind:
196 Atk Timburr Mach Punch vs. 36 HP / 0 Def Diglett: 9-12 (50 - 66.6%) -- guaranteed 2HKO
156 Atk Pawniard Sucker Punch vs. 36 HP / 0 Def Diglett: 16-21 (88.8 - 116.6%) -- 93.8% chance to OHKO
196+ Atk Life Orb Carvanha Aqua Jet vs. 36 HP / 0 Def Diglett: 23-31 (127.7 - 172.2%) -- guaranteed OHKO
200+ Atk Fletchling Acrobatics (110 BP) vs. 36 HP / 0 Def Diglett: 19-24 (105.5 - 133.3%) -- guaranteed OHKO
You get the idea, diglett is weak offensively and defensively but can serve as a great revenger killer and utility pokemon. My verdict however on diglett is that it isn't in the faintest bit broken and
not banworthy.
Gothita
Now to the slightly more controversial trapper, in my opinion. The shadow tag ban from all tiers below OU definitely makes questioning the nature of shadow tag in LC fair. The only completely viable goth set in LC is the scarf; Psychic + Trick + Tbolt + e-ball/hpfire. LC is funny in that psychic typing is actually great offensively. The fight spam and poison prevalence in the tier allow pokemon like abra and goth to be great offensively. One could argue that the calm mind set is viable but even with eviolite, which contrary to the XY Smogon analysis, it pretty much never carries, 50 base defence and no recovery mean that goth can easily be revenged by a physical attacker, a certain "P" comes to mind here.
The main point of discussion with goth that seems to irk people is that it can open up teams for another offensive pokemon to exploit. I'm going to sound pigheaded for saying this again but if you can't handle one pokemon after you lose a single potential wall or check in your team,
it's bad teambuilding! I'm not excluding myself from doing this either but if you have an LC team without resistances/priority/taunt and or encore/phazing moves/status to hinder, or you rely on one Pokemon to do these things, you are inviting yourself to be swept. Goth can be paired to enable a sweep more easily, I've also seen it used to great effect on baton pass teams (not discussing this one), but the long and short of it is, it doesn't guarantee sweeps/wins if it's played against a well built team. I feel like I'm stressing the same point here as I did in the baton pass suspect so I'll stop here.
So with common goth you either have the option to trick something or faint it. Tricking is often great for momentum at the expense/weakening of your gothita. Things like ferroseed and foon become a lot less of a nuisance and you can setup if sweep if the opposing team is weakened/exposed all round but I don't think this makes it eligible for a ban.
Goth suffers from a pretty feeble special attack in the same way diglett is hindered by its attack. Base 55 doesn't even allow it to OHKO a lot of the stuff it's supposed to trap, something I've seen again and again whilst playing on the ladder. 252 isn't the most common spatk (LC spreads) but the damage calc doesn't have a default spread.
252 SpA Gothita Psychic vs. 0 HP / 196 SpD Eviolite Mienfoo: 14-20 (66.6 - 95.2%) -- guaranteed 2HKO (can knock off or uturn out)
252 SpA Gothita Hidden Power Fire vs. 84 HP / 148+ SpD Eviolite Ferroseed: 12-16 (54.5 - 72.7%) -- guaranteed 2HKO (yeah this loses but can weaken goth to the point it's useless with iron head/bullet seed)
252 SpA Gothita Psychic vs. 124 HP / 160 SpD Eviolite Foongus: 14-20 (56 - 80%) -- guaranteed 2HKO (can spore then giga/sludge for damage)
252 SpA Gothita Energy Ball vs. 76 HP / 0 SpD Chinchou: 18-22 (72 - 88%) -- guaranteed 2HKO (volt switch out)
I know these are specific scenarios above and this suspect isn't supposed to be about nitpicking. I find shadow tag to be annoying in OU and ubers as well but it's not a broken ability. Goths weak offences and limited utility make for fairly massive flaws. I can say with confidence that the only times I've lost to gothita have not been because it's broken but are down to misplays/good players on my/my opponents part. Goth is in my opinion
not banworthy.
I look forward to reading the criticism of my points and the posting in response to some of the previous posts. Happy laddering.