On the topic of the unbans, which have become somewhat forgotten recently. I promised a big post a while ago, here it is. Work and existential crises have conspired to hold this off, but couldn't prevent it in the end. Anyway, Nani Man should be back in soon, let's get the discussion wrapped up by then so that we can at last have a formal decision on these temporary unbans.
I shall start by rewriting all the arguments that have been made, alongside perhaps some that haven't yet. Sorry if it sounds repetitive, but I'd like to make it clear exactly why I think what I think, and perhaps I'll be able to put a new spin on things as well. Here's a link to the last big post I made, which I feel still holds some relevance even if I have more, perhaps better points to make focussed more directly on fewer pokemon now.
As has been discussed rather a lot recently, the question that we really come down to is whether we prefer the established metagame along with its own system for getting rid of broken pokemon, or a newer one which attempts to give all types a fairer chance, at the cost of some stability.
Let's start with the common arguments, on either side. Firstly some types are, as it stands, undeniably weaker than other types. Ice is an obvious example, where not only does it have a large number of weaknesses (some of which have a near-literal auto-win such as mega scizor's +2 Bullet Punch OHKOing every ice poke after SR, though SR are arguably harder to get up in monotype) but it also does noticably worse against neutral matchups. From some stats Antar gave me, I randomly chose Fairy as a neutral matchup:
Code:
>>> ratio('Ice','Fairy')
Ice wins: 178, Fairy wins: 276, true ratio: 0.39
(Note that I did this test for a number of neutral matchups and in each case Ice lost beween 60 and 70% of their games).
In a perfect world, Ice would stand as much chance against Fairy as Fairy does against Psychic, for example. The only viable way of doing this, without banning half the metagame, is to introduce something stronger for Ice to use. The only option from ubers (outside of Arceus) is Kyurem-W, and since we've already unbanned his brother Kyu-B we might as well just go ahead and unban Kyu-W, goes the argument.
However there are flaws in this argument. Firstly the idea that Kyu-B being unbanned making Kyu-W easier to unban is silly. Kyu-B was unbanned in OU due to its bad movepool, which includes no physical ice moves outside of the pretty much unusable freeze shock. As many other metagames have found, if you give Kyu-B any physical ice moves, it becomes just as bad as Kyu-W, and has because of this been banned from many of these metagames. But I digress.
There are a number of problems with unbanning Kyurem White. The first, as has been discussed a lot, is that it causes an increase in how much type advantages (and disadvantages) matter. While in a perfect world Ice would stand as much chance against Fairy as Fairy does against Psychic, Ice would equally stand as much chance against Grass as it does against any other type, or at the least type advantage wouldn't count for too much. A competitive metagame is one where, although luck does make a difference (including the luck of whether you have a type advantage), a good enough player will almost always beat a worse player. Kyurem-White helps ice, sure. No doubt about that. But how does it help ice? Does it allow ice to beat fighting? Scarf Terrakion still OHKOs the most common Kyu-W set (scarf) with ease, or nukes the switch-in potentially 2HKOing Avalugg. Does it help ice against the thing that spawned this, namely +2 Mega Scizor OHKOing the entire team with rocks up? Sure, its fusion flares and earth powers are nice against steel, but the ease with which steel can set rocks means it still has the advantage from what I've seen. Here's a random game of my water beating Icehawk's ice. Not a great quality game perhaps, but whereas normally ice would struggle against water, here... ice struggles against water. In fact, the lack of Kyu-B probably helped me. http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/frost-oumonotype-1091297
Or let's look at Skymin for a moment. After all, this is about more than just Kyurem-W. Skymin is infamous for being uncompetitive in two ways. Firstly, it makes water have an extremely difficult time with grass, while other things weak to Skymin have also been hit hard while things like fire barely noticed. But also, its ability to get air slash flinches in a row (four in a row is still more likely than HJK missing and can easily be far more gamebreaking) is another aspect only adding to how uncompetitive it is.
For example, let's look at this replay. It's just a random game I watched (I believe it was the semis of a tournament, I might be wrong). It's of Feliburn using fire against A Sage using Grass. http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/monotype-173486790
Both players play very well. Moreover, at first glance, it appears that the type advantage would have caused a near-certain win for fire had Skymin not being there, with Feliburn simply having to overpower the cradily through sheer numbers of powerful attacks, perhaps sacking something to it, then send in Scarf Darmanitan in sun. Due to Skymin being here however, A Sage actually stands a chance as if Zard Y had fainted turn 21, Mach punch would not have been able to KO Skymin meaning Darmanitan would have to be sent out, which could then be revenge killed by Venusaur due to chlorophyll leading to A sage winning. As it happens, Air Slash misses turn 21 and chlorophyll actually causes A sage to lose that much quicker. But all in all, surely Skymin was doing its job by helping Grass have a chance to beat a type advantage?
Well, the problem is that despite both players playing well, it was only partly a game of skill. There were 5 air slash flinches in a row, followed by air slash missing. This is, unfortunately, the main aspect of the game. Not the plays, expert though they were. No matter who played better here, which honestly is something quite hard to tell, it was decided by the RNG. And this demonstrates the key point about Skymin, but also about the other unbans as well. It may make type disadvantages less important in some cases. But it still doesn't make the game any more competitive, even in these situations where it should do.
So the unbans may give those types an advantage overall, and make them somewhat competitive, but despite that they make the game less competitive as it becomes more matchup-orientated as well as adding Skymin antics to the mix or making it a game of stealth rocks rather than a game of pokemon (moreso than most gen 5 games, even).
Onto my second point. As you may have seen from a number of replays involving the unbanned pokemon, the way the game's played around them is very often different to without them. When building a ground team, for example, you might start with a defensive core of Hippowdon and Gastrodon, followed by Excadrill and Landorus to give it some strong offense. However, I've found that, especially with Ice and Grass, if you want an effective team it's very much a case of starting with the powerful mon, followed by support: A stealth rocker, a spinner/defogger, perhaps heal bell or something, perhaps a few pivots or wallbreakers. A good team should be about six pokemon; or at the very least a core of perhaps three followed by supporters for the core. Similarly, in a battle the game may easily revolve around two pokemon, or very much be a game focussed on your win condition or theirs, perhaps with excadrill being able to sweep in sand as soon as the opponent's mega aggron is taken out by Landorus if we go with the last example.
However, there's a difference between one pokemon being your win condition and the whole point of your team, and then there's a difference between a pokemon being the whole point of your team and being the whole point of any team of that type that wants to be competitive. Excadrill might be your win condition against rock but then Landorus be your win condition against poison, for example. And even if you built a team around a single pokemon, that's not to say it'll always be the most important pokemon. My flying team, for example, has Zard X as the main sweeper. It only actually sweeps in about one in three of the games I win, because it can also act as a wallbreaker if needed while the other pokemon can also sweep. And even if it did always come down to Zard X sweeping, there's a difference between my team always using Zard X to sweep and
all flying teams having to use Zard X to sweep.
If we go back to the replay of Feliburn vs. A Sage, it's quite clearly a game of Skymin vs. fire rather than grass vs. fire. And this is against a type skymin is bad against whereas pokemon like Cradily and Ferrothorn (for rocks) should be more important. I've found the vast majority of high-level games involving these pokemon to be similar: it becomes very much a game focussed on the unbanned pokemon. While this doesn't seem uncompetitive in itself, it is more game-changing than it may seem.
If we look at Nintendo's singles metagame, Battle Spot Singles, it can be very much a game revolving around a single pokemon, very often a mega. Arguably, Nintendo created megas partially for this game dynamic, it explains why only one is allowed per team and arguably makes games balanced. However, Smogon has created a very different metagame for singles, where all pokemon can be countered with relative ease, making for a metagame where the whole team is important rather than having teams based on one overpowered, hard-to-counter pokemon. In my opinion, this has made Smogon metagames more fun, and thus better, than their Nintendo counterparts. It's why so many people play Smogon metagames, despite there being plenty of other options. We should both continue the Smogon tradition and follow the path that seems to give a more balanced metagame; in other words we should try to keep all pokemon counterable to some degree rather than making pokemon a game of one sweeper and some teammates.
The third point is perhaps a little simpler. The problem we have with unbanning pokes is that we have no control over what options there are for unbans. There was only one pokemon not banned that was ice-type, so if we wanted to make ice any stronger we had to unban Kyurem White. Similarly, despite it getting a 100% vote to ban, Skymin was the only option for grass. But what now? The main argument for unbans was that it'd give all types a chance. But it hasn't done. Ice is still used less than the big types like steel, water, flying and psychic, because it's still worse. And what about poison? What was once a noble, if a little outclassed, type struggles far more now. Not only have the types worse than it been given boosts, but those boosts specifically hit it hard. Where Grass was once one of the types a stally poison team could beat, Sub Skymin completely destroys it. And Kyurem-W vs. Poison isn't even a contest, it's a curbstomp. The only poison option for unban would be gengarite, which I have argued strongly against and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. If gengarite were unbanned, stall (which is already weaker than some would like in mono) would be dead. This thing got suspected
in ubers, there's no way it'd be fine in monotype.
So what options are there? I can see three. Firstly, we could leave the metagame as it is, with poison just being bad. But that kinda goes against the whole point of the unbans. It just means they haven't really done their job, and at the same time they've destabalised the metagame and made it less competitive. Another option is to unban Gengarite or perhaps Arceus-Poison or something. But what next? Now we have to help rock monos because they've fallen behind. And what once we've fixed them? There's just going to be another type that's weaker than the others, and we're very quickly running out of things to unban. And the third option, the best one in my opinion, is to go the other way. If we ban the broken things, rather than releasing more broken things, we have far more control over the metagame. And no, we won't ever get all 18 types in perfect harmony. It was the right thing to do to try and get them all balanced, but it's a failed experiment and now that's over we should work on getting the metagame as balanced as possible rather than continuing to aim for the impossible. Personally, I think the following bans would result in the best possible metagame for now, though considering ORAS release is coming up obviously changes could happen:
Firstly, Ban Kyu-W and Skymin, for the reasons above. They aren't helping the metagame TBH, and grass was viable if not amazing before the unbans in any case.
Next, suspect Medichamite and Mawilite. These don't necessarily need to be banned, however there have been concerns raised about each. For Mega Medi, it utterly destroys a number of types in a manner not dissimilar to Talonflame. For Mawilite, many are confused as to why it was unbanned given neither Fairy nor Steel are particularly bad in the current metagame. While I'm not sure Mawilite needs to be rebanned, both are certainly worth putting under suspect test.
And thirdly, Flying needs a nerf. How exactly to go about nerfing it has been one of the main issues I've been thinking about for probably a month, and I've not really come up with any great suggestions. The best options I can think of are suspecting Landorus and Zapdos, both only for flying. I
think that without these flying would be somewhat nerfed and neither offensive nor stally flying would be such a dominating force in the metagame. Still, if anyone has better ideas feel free to say.
Sorry for the very wordy post, I just wanted to clear up what the issues were and what I believe should be done for the metagame.
tl;dr ban stuff.
Articuno I/Death on Wings
