Alright, I think we should all stop this one-sided argument where almost everyone is against Stall. Let's look on the other side of the spectrum, meaning let's actually hear argumenst from "filth" people like me who use stall and are "trash at Pokemon cuz they use skillless teams aka stall".
This will prolly be a long post so bear with the mini-headlines with me:
First of all, Let's address the statement
"Stall is so easy to use and very skilless and has a very good matchup vs. everything!!111", meaning let's learn about stall more:
Many of us wonder, why do people use stall? Well it's because stall is basically a gamble in the stall player's favor (according to the current meta). It has its pros, but it definitely has its cons. For example, stall's biggest pro is that it lessens the quantity of times you lose to matchup, but increases the "quality" of those bad matchups. Meaning that you will lose to machups less frequently, but it also means that when really bad matchups happen, you will almost certainly lose, whereas when using offense you can play around it by overwhelming the opponent to the point where he has to sack or weaken his wincon. Another thing is that stall makes prediction easier; it is very easy to exert pressure on the opponent when you are using stall, and when the opponent is pressured, it's much easier for you to make plays. However at the same time, when using stall, one single misplay can cost you the game, whereas when using HO or bulky offense, your backup wallbreaker/sweeper can hold the team on its back in a clutch way; stall doesn't have that and neither can it do that.
Finally, yes, I do agree that Stall is easier to use than a lot of other playstyles, but at the same time building a successful, consistent stall team is much harder than it sounds. No you just don't throw chansey / goth / m-sab / skarmory or whatever, mind I remind you that Gothitelle on stall was unheard of just about 3-5 months ago.
After all what is said and done, the combination of both Mega Sableye and Gothitelle makes matchup even less and less severe, so I agree that it broken and very restrictive, to elaborate more:
Why the combination of Mega Sableye + Gothitelle is "Broken", "Uncompetitive", or "Unhealthy".
Well, you can make Goth and shadow tag whatever you want it to be, but it is in fact, really easy to beat, it's just that most people don't know how. Gothitelle's main (and massive) weakness is literally having at least one hazard up and just doubling on the most obvious switch to a mon that Gothitelle does not want to trap or lose health to (Magma Storm Heatran, Jirachi, Magnezone, etc. etc.) either because the mon itself is worthless to trick / t-wave (such as magnezone or jirachi), because there is a Pokemon much more threatning that Gothitelle has to keep its health for (Manaphy, Mega Gardevoir, etc.), or because the pokemon you switched into is one of the mighty mega pokemons. And that's of course, assuming you do not have a pursuit trapper.
However, with Mega Sableye around, it is extremely hard to get hazards up. What does this mean? It means that, as long there is no pursuit rapper, switching Goth is
literally not ONLY risk-free, but also somewhat beneficial because the pokemon that goth traps (which is the mon you doubled into fearing goth) cannot double (except if shadow tag, ghost, or shed shell) on the obvious gothitelle switch, and is forced to stay in and do something, while the stall player can go to that pokemon's dedicated check. Forcing you to switch out and gaining momentum.
Now let's talk about how "obvious" a switch into gothitelle on the stall player's part. Well, it's quite obvious. Obviously (no pun intended), the extent of obviousness is dependent on the player's skill, the stall player's skill, and their previous plays throughout the match. Since stall doesn't have a 1-turn move that can turn the game upside down (aside of maybe CM on Mega Sableye, oh wow another resason to ban it!), switching out on any pokemon to your mega (or pokemon with the highest winning rate vs. gothitelle) because you predicted the gothitelle switch, is pretty risk-free and will gain you momentum. The only problem lies if the stall player stayed in predicting your switch predicting goth, but then again, that 1 turn you "wasted" will not give the opponent an enormous advantage over you because stall has nothing of the such, except hazards (which is ever-easy to remove) and CM on Mega Sableye.
The Solution
Quite simple,
ban Mega Sableye, keep Shadow Tag.
Gonna quote
wish killer who quoted someone from PR
"banning sab makes goth mostly unviable unless you're counterteaming someone due to the huge opportunity cost presented when using it in basically anything that isn't full blown sab stall, but banning goth doesn't change the fact that there'd still be a lot of teams that use sableye in combination with a specific, usually unrunnable, rock-weak mon or core that basically aim to win straight from team preview. wonder trio is the most obvious example of this type of team, but there are more. so, basically, from where i'm standing, banning sab takes care of everyone's worries about how "degenerate/unfair" goth is (not really my opinion but w/e) while also putting a stop to all of those matchup-oriented teams. IK it's your posting gimmick to basically defend stall super hard in every PR/OU thread but we aren't (or shouldn't be) balancing the three arbitrarily-defined "playstyles", we're (or should be) balancing the metagame in general.
Let's focus on the part where it says "banning sab makes goth mostly unviable" and "banning goth doesn't change the fact that there'd still be a lot of teams that use sableye in combination with a specific, usually unrunnable, rock-weak mon or core that basically aim to win straight from team preview".
I'm going to use some examples here:
1. ABR/Cleaner than rotom-w's stall team that uses Mega Sableye with the combination of Gothitelle. This is the epitome of what you guys are calling "broken, uncompetitive, and/or unhealthy" because it NEVER loses to matchup outside of straight counterteaming (Shed shell toge/mana + T-tar idea) and literally requires no prediction, skill, or any human intellect to use.
2.
My stall team, where I use Gothitelle without the use of Mega Sableye, but instead with Mega Slowbro, something that most people will not find on stall and something, that according to people is "easily worn down" and probably will never be broken. This team is literally destroyed by any consistently good spike-stacking team that has a Manaphy or Togekiss or any good wall/stall breaker on it.
3.
Googly's Stall team, where, like me,
Googly uses Gothitelle without Mega Sableye, but instead with Mega Scizor, something that was never considered broken, but very healthy and never too centralizing. This team is also quite weak to hazard spam + team-specific threat such as Scizor or Mega Medicham
4.
Wonder Trio, where
Branflakes325 uses Mega Sableye without Gotitelle, but with Shedinja, directly relating to the idea of "sableye + specific rock weak pokemon that is usually deemed unviable but improves matchup by a lot". This team may be called trash by a lot, but it's a very well done stall team that loses to matchup so much less often than normal teams thanks to Mega Sableye + Shedinja (rock weak pokemon that makes matchup better), and guess what? It does
not use gothitelle.
What happens if Mega Sableye gets banned
Aside from the obvious boom in hazard spam teams, your problem will be solved, simple. Again gonna quite
wish killer
Goth is close to unviable on Balance because they need all 6 slots to not get swept by infinite things (trust me, I've tried it) and it's a huge momentum sink with a large opportunity cost on any offensive team, I've only seen one consistently successful Gothitelle offensive team and none of the matchups it presents are by any means unwinnable for a large number of reasons. People using this fucking argument have either never tried to use Goth on their balance/offense teams or just have really poor metagame/teambuilding knowledge. There isn't any doubt that Goth/Sab combined is very restrictive, but Gothitelle is far from restrictive as soon as Sableye gets banned for a lot of reasons and it'll probably be stall's only way of being both reasonably viable and "balanced" (not creating a large number of unwinnable matchups).
Without Mega Sableye, all the teams that used it, including stall, will have a much harder time in keeping hazard of the field, aka the #1 thing that beats stall. This means that running gothitelle will come with much more risk ESPECIALLY to bulkier teams like stall. People don't realize it but it is in fact because
gothitelle is dead weight aside from sack fodder in a lot of matchups. However that risk that stall risks rapidly goes down thanks to the simple fact that you have Mega Sableye on the team. So meaning if m-sab gets banned Goth will have much more risk and that a lot of times the stall player will find him/her self sacking goth more than actually using it, especially against an opponent who actually knows how Gothitelle works.
Look at my team for example, like holy fuck there were tons of times that I got swept by hazards + very powerful team-specific threat such as Manaphy. The team's inability to consistently keep hazards off like that of goth+m-sab stall made the team much more vulnerable to hazard spam teams or to really any decent player that has a threat (such as manaphy, yes you can tell i fucking hate this thing) and actually knows how gothitelle works and how to counteract it.
phew, that was a lot
