Alrighty, I have already given my thoughts on Dracovish in the metagame discussion forum, but this time I am going to expand on them. I am going to go over defensive counterplay to it, how it effects teambuilding, and why its a bad presence for the metagame overall.
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So the first way that you can deal with Dracovish is with a Water resist, Pokemon such as Tangrowth, Baneful Bunker Toxapex and Slowbro are easily the best ones by far as they are great Pokemon in their own right while being able to deal with Dracovish pretty well. But I feel the problem with this is that first of all, there are very little Water-types that can actually pivot into Dracovish, stuff like Rotom-W, Tapu Fini, Dragapult and Hydreigon are completely dumpstered by Fishious Rend, all of them pretty much always getting 2HKOed by it, so its really only limited to those 3 including Mega Slowbro, and this are the Pokemon, especially Slowbro and Toxapex, that have been seeing the most usage in NDPL. Toxapex and Slowbro getting #1 and #2 in Week 1 respectively, and Toxapex having #2 in NDPL. This is incredibly centralising but in a very negative way because you are forced to run these to not get something killed by Dracovish, and if you lose them, then Dracovish immediately has an advantage against the rest of your team, and its not hard to remove those checks because of its teammates, Cinderace, Slowbro and Tapu Koko are all great partners for it and they all can either remove them, or weaken them enough to where they are in Dracovish range. There are also Pokemon like Gastrodon and Seismitoad, who just invalidate Fishious Rend altogether, except that they cannot really switch into it because Dragon Rush can just beat them.
I've also talked about metagame trends, like Future Sight being an excellent move and the best its ever been, and I feel its largely due to Dracovish's effectiveness at abusing it. Dracovish already lacks consistent defensive answers, and with getting rid of Toxapex, one of the best answers to it because of Baneful Bunker, it becomes even harder to deal with both in teambuilding and in practice, because if dealing with Dracovish wasn't hard enough, now partners like Future Sight Slowbro, Cinderace and Tapu Koko emerging as great partners that abuse those Pokemon, its going to be harder to really deal with it, this wouldn't be as much of a problem if defensive teams were not everywhere and at the forefront of the metagame, because Dracovish abuses those teams far too well. Cinderace is easily the best partner for Dracovish, as its already one of the best Pokemon in the metagame, and aids it incredibly well due to how effective of an offensive pivot it is. Cinderace itself already lacks Pokemon that want to switch into it, and it can use that to its advantage by bringing in something like Hippowdon which Dracovish can force out and probably get a kill in the process, the most effective way of dealing with VishAce is with Mega Slowbro, who I feel completely shot up a ton in viability and it is largely due to how threatening this core is. Dracovish in my eyes is more problematic because of how it can pair up with other stuff, not just Cinderace and still do so much work against teams, and how its answers only need a bit of chip to get 2HKOd, which I feel adds more to Dracovish's unhealthiness.
Overall I feel Dracovish has an unhealthy impact on the metagame as a whole, it is consistently difficult to handle both in teambuilding and in practice because of its complete lack of consistent defensive counterplay. It adds pretty much nothing positive and its ban will only make teambuilding more diverse and less constricted, ban it.
