Following Terrakion's quick retest into ban confirmation vote, the NU council has decided to suspect test Chandelure next!
Chandelure has been on the radar of the council and community for quite some time now, but it is only being acted on now for a few reasons. For starters, Chandelure has a very noted entry hazard weakness in a tier where hazard removal isn't so good. Thus, the frequently cited Choice Specs set isn't so simple to claim KOs with because you have very limited chances to hit the field. Furthermore, when you mispredict when using this set, you're often giving away a lot of momentum to your opponent even if you get great damage on a foe. Additionally, the tier is very clearly favoring offensive builds currently. This isn't so good for Chandelure because it's mainly looking to find slow balance teams. Such builds cannot reliably offensively pressure it, and Chandelure's ridiculous strength typically gives it easy 2HKOes with hazards support there. Lastly, our faster offensive threats en masse do a fantastic job of beating it down, such as Flygon, Paldean Tauros-W, Barraskewda, and Cinccino, as well as NU's common priority users being very effective against it.
On the other hand, Chandelure is arguably the reason offense is king. While our offensive structures would be perfectly fine and still great without it, it's hard to justify slower builds of any sort right now because Chandelure as a wallbreaker puts a chokehold on how varied you can be with them. We have great pieces for such teams--such as Meloetta, Scrafty, Incineroar, and Goodra--that can come in on Chandelure's STAB attacks and force it out, but inevitably you have a checklist to fill out when building these teams. Chandelure being as strong as it is and being rather low drawback as a Choice item wallbreaker makes it quite tough to do so successfully. Compare it to Choice Specs Toxtricity, for example: Toxtricity is always locking into a move with an immunity to it, whereas Chandelure doesn't face that same issue and has Trick as a midground play. Lastly, despite Chandelure having next to no SCL success, it's been very solid in tournaments overall as shown by its winrate being the highest amongst top-20 used Pokemon.
NOTE: THIS TEST WILL BE USING THE NEW SUSPECT PROCESS!
The instructions to participate in this test are as follows:
- Create a new account on PS. You do not have to follow any specific naming convention, but your suspect account must have never played a game in NU before this suspect test went up or you will not receive valid requirements (resetting W/L does not count for this - the account you use must never have played NU before the test, full stop.
- At any point on your new account, use the command /linksmogon on Pokemon Showdown! You will receive instructions on what to do once you run this command.
- If you have any questions about this new process, feel free to PM me.
The requirement to vote in this suspect test is a COIL value of 2800. The deadline for getting requirements will be Sunday, November 2nd at 11:59pm GMT+11.
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