Our time as Pet Mod of the Season has finally come to a close, as has our last slate before
spring break! Yes, that's right... we're going to be taking the next
three weeks off from running serious slates.
Over the last three months, the mod has grown more than any of us could have possibly imagined. A decently-active ladder, a rapidly growing invested competitive community (our Discord server has
five times the amount of members as when we started), and a ton of new faces, many of whom have already proven to be incredibly cool people who I hope stick around now that we won't really have a ladder anymore.
This break is
sorely needed, for us at least. Overall, PMOTS was certainly an experience, good and bad, and given how exhausted all of us on the council are I consider it a small miracle that we made it out the other side in one piece. Hopefully you'll stick around to see where we head next!
Unlike last time we were exhausted enough to take a hiatus, I am actually too exhausted to draw a cute picture and write out a bunch of sappy thank-yous, :'D so you'll just have to imagine it. Know that I am grateful for the support the mod has received, even if it's been overwhelming at times!
But before we kick our feet up for good, we do have some more news announcements to get through, such as...
Results of our recent Balance Changes survey!

As you might recall, we
recently held a poll on a variety of buffs and nerfs to some of our existing Mega Evolutions that was set to close at the same time as voting on this slate. So here are the results!

Mega Exploud
will have the
functionality of its ability, Seismic Scream, edited (23-2)

Krookodile
will be
losing access to
Parting Shot (22-4)

Krookodile
will not be
losing access to
Topsy Turvy (13-13)

Krookodile
will be
gaining access to
Memento (23-3)

Mega Rillaboom
will have
amended stats (namely Attack) (22-4)

Mega Toxtricity
will have
its ability, Acid Rock, nerfed to deal less poison damage (24-1)
Moving onwards; since we're going on break, we do have some non-slate-related activities planned for the next couple weeks!
First of all, there's the first-ever MfA Draft League, run by
Paulluxx, that'll be starting up this weekend! Be sure to keep an eye on that --
the drafts look really cool and I'm personally really looking forward to watching it unfold.
Additionally, esteemed council member
Hematemesis is back from his several-month absence, as is the
Teambuilding Competition that he runs! The
Teambuilding Competition is run via the
Discord, so be sure to hop on if you want to participate! We just wrapped up a focus week on
Mega Torterra, which you can view
here, and team submissions focused around Celesteela
(which doesn't have a Mega Evolution at time of writing, Bolivia just likes it) are open now.
He's also running a special tour that's scheduled for
tomorrow!! I'll paste what he said in the Discord's #announcements channel here:
Hey hey! It's Bolivia here with a special announcement for the next tournament run by yours truly
.
For starters, I'd like to thank the other 4 council members for the repeated hard work they put into making this experience an enjoyable one for everyone. MFA is easily one of if not the best community smogon has to offer, and it's thanks to the hard work of those 4. I'm going to attempt to step up and make some fun things happen around here while they all take a much deserved break, because they have more than earned it. Anyway, let's get into the tournament...
There is a pokemon (really, an ability) that has always been near and dear to my heart, despite allegedly causing people tons of pain. For this, it has been banned in 5 generations, despite always being very fringe/close to OU. I personally think with the powercreep of the new megas, this thing might be fine for reentry, but that's a long ways off. In the meantime, let's have some fun with
Molehouse (Bolivia making art, and it looks decent? Preposterous)
Here's how this tournament will work: it's literally the exact same as normal MFA singles, but arena trap is legalized instead of banned. It may be my magnum opus at the expense of people who do not like this pokemon, but I encourage you to have some fun.
Arena trap is legal, so maybe some eviolite Trapinch are going to be there? Anyway, the tournament will be best of 1 single elimination 0_0, which means you have little room for error >:). We'll be running it sometime Saturday (at the moment, I have it scheduled for 3:00 EST), but since there are some form of holidays happening, and we want to include as many people as possible, I'm open to pushing things back or moving things around if needed.
Hopefully this chaotic ruleset and chaotic ability in the fray lead to a memorable tournament! Let's all have some fun at
Molehouse!!!
... And with that, we're officially on break for most of the rest of April!
It's nice to finally be out of the spotlight and have a chance to kick our legs up and breathe a little.
But just because it's break doesn't mean we don't have more fun stuff planned! We'll be running a couple tours over the break, as well as some other activities like I said earlier. But first in line, to kick off our spring break events, we have a fun low-stakes creative project to do for the next week...
Submissions for Slate 32.5 are now open!
That's right! The hotly-anticipated first April Fools slate of v7 has finally arrived! This year's theme is
"not-technically-an-NFE" fully evolved Pokemon -- Pokemon who
either have base forms that can evolve or can only evolve under special circumstances, but regardless cannot use an Eviolite.
Yes this wasn't a joke! I mean it is a joke but we are doing it!
Now, it's worth noting here that
these three Megas will not be usable in the main format, due to two of their base forms being inaccessible or unreleased as of Gen 7, and also due to all three of them being jokes. Due to this,
these Mega Evolutions should be primarily designed with our Random Battles format in mind! Now that PMotS is over, Hematite and I can finally get round to doing that Random Battles rework we've been wanting to do for ages now. And in fact that is what we are going to be doing instead of running any real kind of quality control on this slate, so knock yourselves out... mostly: