I'm against unbanning Aegislash. And I’d like explain why I think Aegislash will impact the metagame negatively by focusing on an entirely different Pokemon : Landorus.
Now, Landorus is widely considered to be the most powerful Pokemon in the metagame, besides maybe Metagross and Altaria, both of which are megas and are therefore not found with nearly as much frequency. And Aegislash’s presence in the metagame is just going to make Landorus even harder to deal with than it is now. Simply put, it is the perfect partner for Landorus. Just look at the Pokemon Landorus struggles against : Latios, Latias, Mega Latias, Cresselia, Celebi and Togekiss if not running Sludge Wave, Chansey, Slowking, Starmie to some extent, SpD Skarmory. You know what beats all these pokemon? Aegislash! Aegislash is just the perfect partner to Landorus, it handles all the bulky Psychics and Flying types that cause it trouble, and in return, Landorus takes Ground moves aimed towards it, handling both Amoonguss and Gliscor, Aegi’s 2 best counters, very well. Aegislash makes so many of Landorus’s checks a liability that it will just be harder to harder to deal with.
And yes, you can argue that SpD Mandibuzz, AV Torn-T and SpD YZard handle both of these Pokemon. Except that not only can Aegislash run Head Smash and lure these for Landorus, but Landorus can run Rock Slide and do the exact same thing for Aegi (though Rock Slide doesn’t 2HKO SpD mandibuzz, it does after SR damage, and gives that Mandibuzz is usually the Defogger it’s probably going to switch into SR). So, when you have a Torn-T and you’re facing a team with Aegislsh and Landorus (which you’ll find to be a common occurrence on the suspect ladder), you don’t know if Landorus will have Rock Slide, Aegi will have Head Smash, both or neither. And besides, with Aegislash in the metagame, Landors can easily afford to run Rock Slide. After all, the standard RP set run Earth Power, HP Ice and Sludge Wave. The only thing Sludge Wave really hits are Togekiss and Celebi. Togekiss already takes a lot from Rock Slide, and Celebi will probably dissapear off the face of the earth with Aegislash around. So the standard RP set will probably shift to RP/Earth Power/HP Ice/Rock Slide, and with Aegislash as pursuit support or just support in general, it’ll be more effective than it’s ever been.
You can also argue that we can just ban Landorus later if it’s a problem. But this suspect test is supposed to evaluate Aegislash’s effect on the current metagame, the one with Landorus in it, and that effect is probably pretty negative. Sure, we can suspect and ban Landorus later, but we can’t just assume Landorus will be banned eventually and vote depending on that. We didn’t let Deo-D stay in OU anticipating a Bisharp suspect. And it’s not like Landorus is the only thing which appreciates Aegi’s presence. Aegislash is still pretty ridiculous on it own right as I’m sure other people in this thread will explain in great detail, but it’s the impact it has on the metagame which is the real problem. For every Pokemon made worse Aegislash, another is made better because it doesn’t have to deal with something Aegislash beats. Aegislash is basically a catalyst for making powerful Pokemon more powerful. By invalidating all kinds of builds and Pokemon, other Pokemon can thrive off its back. For example, in XY, Landorus, Thundurus and Charizard-X were considered to be broken by some. But once Aegi left, they turned out not to be. So, if we unbn Aegi, we’ll need to do a bunch of more bans to have an enjoyable metagame, and then we’ll still have Aegislash as the most centralising, powerful force, creating a very static metagame of Aegi builds vs non-Aegi builds.
Really, the idea that we should handle threats by introducing a completely centralising threat to the metagame and thus creating an illusion of balance seems like the wrong approach to me. This kinda ties in to what I said in the Giratina suspect thread about the choice between a stale metagame vs a difficult one to build for. The thing is, that’s just with one ban/unban. If we look in the long run, unbanning more and more stuff will just lead to an even more stale metagame. On the other hand, if we ban more and more things, we’ll eventually end up with fewer threats we need to account for, and thus, easier teambuilding. Sure, these threats we ban would keep other threats in check, but at a certain point you’ll only end up with Pokemon which already have enough solid checks and counters to not be considered broken. So even if by banning one thing other threats rise to the top, if these threats are problematic, if they stay on top no matter how the metagame evolves around it, we can ban them, if not we can keep them. At the end of the line, if most Pokemon in the metagame have a solid number of good checks and can be handled my all playstyles, we know we’ve achieved a balanced metagame.
To me, unbanning things in general really seems like the wrong way to go right now, because no matter what, we’ll never get a perfect metagame if we do that, we’ll always have this one centralising force which controls the metagame and makes it boring, whereas by banning stuff, we progressively get a more and more diverse and enjoyable metagame. So imo, don’t unban Aegi, keep banning stuff, we’ll get a good metagame eventually.
