I heavily disagree with the decision to quickban Victini. There was no room or opportunity for the community to discuss and give input on this, and it seems very brash to quickban something immediately after we have just finished a suspect test.
In the future, I hope to see quickbans reserved for things that are obviously and unanimously agreed upon to be broken (I.e., Marshadow in gen 7 OU), rather than Pokemon that only suspect worthy.
I'm sure the council has their reasoning for taking this approach, but it does not sit well with me.
I don't mind people disagreeing with this decision whatsoever but I have qualms with a few things in this post.
The idea that there was no room for the community to discuss and give input on this is misguided. It was brought up in the survey that was brought out over a month ago and the community has been free to talk about it since before that too - it was also mentioned as something that would be acted upon
in the op of our last metagame thread. There is also the PS! room, the UU discord, and I'm sure there are plenty of private avenues where the tier is discussed too. Perhaps it wasn't discussed enough, but that isn't because there was no opportunity to do so. In addition, Terrakion being banned only helps Victini realistically - might open up some niche short-term checks like Incineroar a little more but that's nothing compared to losing such a prominent revenge killer.
As for the second part, this is not a quickban akin to that of Marshadow, Mega Pinsir etc. in the past because unlike those there is absolutely going to be a Victini retest in the reasonably near future (unless OU steals it, in which case there's nothing we can do anyway). If you disagree with this then that's fine but to me it is a completely separate situation and should be treated as such, the comparisons don't really make sense.
Again, if you're unhappy with the quickban that's totally fine, I get it. It's impossible to please everyone when tiering, no matter what approach you take, but saying that the community had no input is extremely unfair - there were *lots* of opportunities, this is not a mon that propped up out of nowhere, it has been discussed for a while now both internally in council discussions and elsewhere. There will also be more opportunities to discuss it whenever it's retested. I'm sorry if that isn't satisfactory, but tiering this generation is pretty awful and while I don't think every decision or method is perfect, I do genuinely believe this was the best course of action the tier could have taken right now.
I'd like to throw my two cents in wrt the Victini quickban as well -- I'm strongly opposed to it, largely due to two factors: first, the justification for a quickban seems arbitrary, self-contradictory, and not in line with the way tiering has happened for other threats. secondly, the decision to quickban victini is extremely out of line with the overall opinion of the tier and its players.
I'm going to start with the second point, because I think it's the most objective and obvious. On the community surveys sent out a few weeks ago, a whopping .7% of the community voted to quickban victini. Not 7%, .7%. Another 20% or so were strongly in favor of a suspect, and the other 80% of the playerbase was either actively against a suspect test (and a ban), or interested in a suspect at some point in the future but not clearly in favor of a ban.
In fairness -- the meta has changed since that survey. Terrakion isn't here anymore -- and while Terrakion definitely was a strong offensive check to the vast majority of victini sets, I don't think its presence or absence is polarizing enough to change those numbers too drastically. From a purely subjective standpoint, I haven't seen anyone advocating for a victini quickban after Terrakion is gone, and it was never mentioned as something that was likely or conditional upon Terrakion being banned. Like many other people, I feel like this quickban is pretty out of left field -- it's definitely been mentioned in the larger discourse around the tier, but never in a way to where it seems like it was a serious option on the table.
For there to be this huge of a disparity between the community and the council (.7% vs 100%), there are only a few conclusions you can draw. The first is that the tier has just changed that much in the intervening few weeks -- as I mentioned above, such a shift would probably be accompanied by popular community calls for victini quickbans and discussion of victini needing to quickban if terrakion left the tier -- none of that was present. The second is that the council and the larger community don't agree on this subject. This seems far more likely -- and I think it's understandably frustrating to see the community so actively against a quick ban (again, fewer than 1% voted for it in the survey) to seemingly no avail.
Now on to the first point: to begin, according to the UU survey, pre the terrakion ban 50% of the council voted for victini to be banned, and 50% voted against it. According to Lily in the post above, that has now shifted to 100%. This is definitely a dramatic shift -- and given that the only thing that's changed is that Terrakion was banned, I can only assume that the justification for the 50% of council members whose votes changed was contingent on that shift. Here's the thing: I don't think that's a particularly invalid assumption to come to. But it's literally been... two days since the ladder was updated to account for Terrakion being banned? There hasn't been a single UUPL battle post-Terrak meta or any other tournament without it but with victini? It's weird to me that in these two days, every single council member that previously voted DNB on a theoretical suspect gained enough experience in the post-terrak meta to decide unequivocally that victini was not only banworthy, but worth of a quickban.
There's only one other factor other than Terrakion -- the future shifts. This is where I have a particular problem and where I think the argument presented in this thread is self-contradictory. You can't say "we do not tier based on the future" if you're literally using it as a "nail in its coffin". That is tiering based on the future. I think this particularly strikes a sore spot for me because I brought up slowking leaving during the Terrakion suspect and was (rightfully) shut down for speculating. Why is it no longer unacceptable to consider potential future rises and drops while making tiering decisions? I'm asking not only for this case, but for clarity in the future, as it seems like there's a lot of mixed messaging regarding this.
I value and respect all the hard work of the council, and I don't want this to come off as attacking them or their choices -- I realize you'll never be able to please everyone. But quickbanning a mon that less than 1% of the community wanted to QB, skipping the suspect process entirely, and including self-contradicting language about future drops in the justification makes it easy to feel that the council isn't listening to the community at large or playing by the same rules -- and in the interest of clearing up that sentiment, I think more explanation / reconsideration of this decision is necessary.
I wanted to discuss this elsewhere but I guess it makes more sense here. Forgive the poor formatting but I'm not quoting over and over on mobile.
"On the community surveys sent out a few weeks ago, a whopping .7% of the community voted to quickban victini. Not 7%, .7%. Another 20% or so were strongly in favor of a suspect, and the other 80% of the playerbase was either actively against a suspect test (and a ban), or interested in a suspect at some point in the future but not clearly in favor of a ban."
You are right but you're also skewing these numbers, which is mostly my mistake since I never should've let this be an option. By lumping indifference in with either category you create an imbalance and I made these categories much vaguer than I should have by including options like "it is very strong but should not be suspected over other elements" as ultimately this is pretty useless information, it doesn't give us a hard yes or no about whether or not this voter thinks Victini is unhealthy or not - they could think it's fine, or they could think it's broken but less broken than something else. I think dropping 80% as a number is misleading but you have a good point here and I'm sorry for that. Worth noting is that this survey was quite some time ago at this stage and that we were just over the ban of Victini's best check (meta hadn't yet developed) and also that Terrakion, an incredible offensive check, was still around and being slated. Things have gone actively in its favour since which is the main reason for this decision.
"I think it's understandably frustrating to see the community so actively against a quick ban (again, fewer than 1% voted for it in the survey) to seemingly no avail."
I disagree here - not voting for it does not mean you are opposed to it. In fact, a significant portion of the community agrees with or is fine with this decision as can be seen through discussion on this thread and on Discord. Again, misleading numbers are pretty unfair.
"Now on to the first point: to begin, according to the UU survey, pre the terrakion ban 50% of the council voted for victini to be banned, and 50% voted against it. According to Lily in the post above, that has now shifted to 100%. This is definitely a dramatic shift -- and given that the only thing that's changed is that Terrakion was banned, I can only assume that the justification for the 50% of council members whose votes changed was contingent on that shift."
No, not really. This has been a very hot discussion for weeks now - highlighting the problem is often all it takes for people to actually realise what's wrong. Let's look at Alakazam, a Pokemon that's picking up in usage right now and is being considered as banworthy by some. Do you think this is because of the Terrakion ban? I think that would be a pretty silly notion. No, it's because of a) metagame shifts and b) spotlights.
Things often work out in favour of another thing passively. For example, as Zeraora became more and more dominant, Victini became better because it performs well against Nidoqueen, Grass-types and other Pokemon that check Zeraora. These two Pokemon then created a chokehold on the meta that severely worsened bulky Steels like Celesteela and Jirachi which in turn was great for Alakazam, it just took took people a while to notice. Metagames are ever evolving and adapting - Victini, Zeraora and others put a pretty unhealthy restrain on it that was difficult to address, but at large the community and council felt that Victini was the straw that broke the camel's back. Things just change, it isn't always the result of some massive shift or ban.
"You can't say "we do not tier based on the future" if you're literally using it as a "nail in its coffin". That is tiering based on the future. I think this particularly strikes a sore spot for me because I brought up slowking leaving during the Terrakion suspect and was (rightfully) shut down for speculating."
I thought I worded this clearly enough but to be absolutely positively clear, we were taking action on Victini regardless of Slowking's presence in the tier. The reason it was brought up is that it is effectively a guaranteed rise and I thought it'd make sense to at least mention it - it was not a driving force or anchoring reason to ban it. What I will admit - and this is where it gets complicated - is that the decision to quickban & retest specifically rather than suspect test was contingent on Slowking's position in UU. This was my fault for not putting it in the OP but as TDK pointed out, the reasoning was as follows:
We are set to lose Slowking. If Slowking was to be lost we would most likely have quickbanned Victini without question as all counterplay is pretty much gone at that point. If we had suspect tested it now and it was voted to stay, we are in an awkward position - a Pokemon is voted to remain UU, and its sole consistent check is removed from the tier a week later. What do we do? The answer is nothing - the community has already spoken, and we're p much stuck with a ruined meta.
How do you address this? Two ways.
A) Wait for Slowking to leave and then quickban or suspect test
B) Quickban and retest later when the time is right
Neither of these were ideal, but our hands were pretty tied. We don't tier based on the future but it is not something we can ignore when it is nigh-guaranteed and also fast approaching.
None of this is supposed to imply that this decision was handled perfectly. I do not even remotely believe it was and I think a lot of that can be put down to me & my inexperience as a leader - I rushed this a bit, that's for sure. However, I don't think there was an easy solution here no matter what we did. I'm sorry that you feel like you're not being listened to - I sent you a DM earlier, feel free to reply to it if this response is still unsatisfactory. I do hope I can do better for you & for this community in future but I can promise you that as it stands I'm trying my hardest to do what I think is right & I'm sorry if that doesn't align with your own thinking. Please don't hesitate to talk to me if you feel as though you need to air more concerns or if I didn't address something properly, it is 3am after all and I'm sure some of this is more rambly than it should be.
- While I think quickbans are terrible for the environment, if it was truly unanimous then can't really argue - it would have been banned on a suspect anyways if that was the case so this just saves time.
- I have no problem with this, I think it's always good to re-test banned mons to see how they live up to the current meta. If it is truly still broken, it will get banned anyways, and if the council allowed it to get re-tested then that means at least somebody believes there's a chance it may be ok. So, I'll be giving it a chance and seeing how it plays out. I will reserve opinions on whether or not it's ok until after getting reqs.
can stomach a few stabs to gain momentum with parting shot, doesn’t like CC or subtox
chople sets can take on CC sets alongside intimidate, ability to force hazards against a switch out, doesn’t like subtox or specs
outright invalidates subtox and can force BU on king’s shield. doesn’t like specs or CC 
