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ORASCL II - Format Discussion

Ruffles

Ruffles

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Hi,
  • ORACL is the official successor of our triall ORAS Undergrounds last year, a tournament that we started to highlight the ORAS lower tiers and their playerbase.
  • Previous format = 6 teams, 10 slots of Ubers, UU, RU, NU, PU, ZU, LC, DOU, Monotype, UG BO3 (Tier rotation)
  • This year, with ORASCL becoming an official tour with a CA prize, we want to flesh it out, make it more accessible, and also make it distinctly different than ORASPL
New Format
  • ORAS OU
  • ORAS OU
  • Flex A1
  • Flex A2
  • Flex A3
  • Flex A4
  • Flex B1
  • Flex B2
  • Flex B3
  • Flex B4
Format Continued
  • The Flex slots are 4 distinct ORAS tiers from a pool of 10 tiers: Ubers, DOU, UU, RU, NU, PU, ZU, LC, Monotype, ORAS OU [Suspect]
    • This means a team can pick Ubers UU PU Monotype but not UU UU PU Monotype
    • If each team picks UU as 1 of their 4 flex slots, there will be 2 UU games for that week
    • Flex slots are picked by each team, without knowing what the other team is picking, then once the tiers are known to both teams, lineup is submitted.
    • ORAS OU [Suspect] will rotate each week and will be announced before flex slots are picked. It will rotate from a banning an OU pokemon (such as Vocarona) to letting an Ubers pokemon in (such as Hoopa-Unbound)
  • 6 teams, 10 starters + 4 subs, 2 managers
  • Manager buys will be 15k for one, 35k for two
  • Each team will have 140k credits
  • No tier locks
General Info
  • This format allows OU players in while still keeping it primarily lower tier focused, and also making this tournament distinct from ORASPL
  • This format can reward players that are really good in one tier that their team can pick every week and in TB, that way farming the entire tour (e.g. pak in UU or zee in DOU), and it also rewards players that can play multiple lower tiers that can defend flex slots from the opposing team (e.g. Feen, LpZ, Lighthouses, BluBirD etc.)
  • If you want to learn more about this or see it in action, check out NUCL / RUCL
  • ORASCL II will open player signups on Feb 8th
What to Discuss / What can be Changed?
  • ORAS OU [Suspect] (and maybe Monotype) can be changed to something else
    • Note: The suspect slot has no tiering implications and it's purely for curiosity and fun
  • Potential 3 managers. This tournament, although shorter with 6 teams, requires more effort from managers and engagement is very important
  • Potentially limiting manager buys to 1 or making it 40k for two
  • General feedback on this format
 
I don’t have a lot of specific feedback for things like manager buys, but I just wanted to hype up the CL format! I’ve been a big part of the last two NUCLs and they have been some of my favorite tours! CL format is really cool in addition to a PL because it emphasizes flexible players that can move around, gives managers a lot more influence on the week to week strategy, promotes different strategies even in the draft. How do you cover all of the bases? Where do you spend your money? Do you think your opp is going to pick x tier? You can either double it or let them pick if for you if you only want to play it once. There is just so much room for creativity and diversity here! I think this is a great addition!
 
I love this format as a player, but I do think Monotype should be included in here - I’d argue it’s not nearly as siloed of a tier as it used to be, and drafting a solid player + multi-tier support can be enough for the slot as it is with lower tiers. As for 3 managers, I don’t oppose it, but I wouldn’t make it mandatory - 3 teams of 6 managers is unorthodox, for sure, but I see the appeal with this level of required involvement from managers. No opinion on self-buying. Cheers.
 
Two things:

Go to 8 Managers - I understand this is supposed to be the replacement for Underground, but 6 managers for a CA tour with OU and every single low tier/niche format just feels weird for a community as big as ORAS. Plus, 6 team tours just kind of suck, with playoffs in particular being a sore spot with no great solution compared to 8.

Don't add a Suspect Slot - SMPL had one of these for a couple years and it didn't really accomplish much of anything in terms of actually gauging how the community feels about a specific issue. This only gets compounded by it by adding it as a Flex Slot, where who's actually playing and whether they're actually getting consistent playing time week to week. Most players would only get somewhere in the range of 2-4 games in said slot, which makes it very difficult to gauge opinions from a playerbase. In addition, effectively adding another ORAS OU as a tier you can pick as a flex slot could take away from the emphasis on Lower Tiers, with potentially 4/10 slots being OU.
 
Monotype usage (ORASPL + Underground)

Water - 10
Flying - 9
Psychic - 18
Normal - 7
Dragon - 4
Fairy - 5
Fire - 5
Poison - 1
Dark - 9
Ground - 9
Rock - 2
Bug - 1
Steel - 4
Fighting - 2
Electric - 1

These are some quick stats from the last ORASPL and Underground. I might’ve missed a few things since this was done manually.

The difference in type picks is pretty telling. Psychic alone was used 18 times, while the next closest is Water at 10. Dark sitting at 9 is probably a direct response to how dominant Psychic has been. Bug was literally used once , and that was by my team in ORASPL specifically to counter Psychic.

Given this, I honestly don’t see how this tier is justified having a slot right now. I’d strongly request the mods and host team to at least consider removing Monotype as an experiment for this tour, and replacing it with something like ORAS AG, which actually has an established and active player base.

as for some people who might say I used chat gpt or something - Yes I did to make it a bit cleaner :)

I want to be clear that I don’t have anything against the Monotype community. However, if Monotype is being included despite being heavily matchup-based and dominated by the same few types over and over, then I don’t see why AG shouldn’t be included as well. AG has solid resources, a good and growing player-base, one of the strongest old-gen AG formats, and it’s genuinely fun to play.

I also support having three managers. Given the number of slots in this tournament, it requires constant attention, and three managers worked perfectly in ORASPL. I don’t really see a convincing reason to move away from that. That said, limiting manager buy-ins to one slot for 20k makes sense and keeps things balanced.

As for the suspect slot, speaking personally, I’ve always found it a bit Mickey, and I think a lot of people feel the same way. It hasn’t worked well across different generations. That said, since we’re talking specifically about ORAS, where people have long wanted some action on Pokémon like Volcarona and possibly Hoopa, I think it could actually be an interesting experiment here. For that reason, I’m in favor of trying it out.

Could make the no. of teams 8 tbh, we all know that the player-base is huge and since it does award a CA, I believe more people will be signing up and would be more interested in ORAS, I am pretty sure we will receive quality signups both with regards to the players and managers.
 
thoughts on 4OU and then three flexes per team? oras has an enormous ou playerbase and there is support to cut at least monotype. me personally i wld cut dou too as i still maintain the opinion that dou has no place in singles dominated teamtours and consistently makes the teamtour experience worse but if u want to just do like 3 ou 1 uu per week and then 3 flexes from each team(no uu allowed) that's fine too idm.
tldr: consider more ou and cutting monotype for that
 
I think mono was really balanced at least in terms of players being 3-4, 4-3, etc... at least by week 7 ORASPL. In other words we had a really strong and competive feeling pool for mono players and id say they are definitely there and ready to play, ready and inspired to compete for a higher score for a tour like this! To take that away right after ORASPL would feel pretty bad for oras especially after there is new mono old gen council (at least in my experience) wanting to look for as much info as possible for any new stats to use for viability, usage, and possibly any balance changes needed.

EDIT: kinda skimmed over the format of the tour LOL i thought this was a different kind of tour. We don't put the actual names of the tours in the intro or title (instead of just the acronym) so its harder to tell what kind of tour im looking at here
 
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RE: 8 teams
I think this is very reasonable, we will highly consider it if there’s enough interest

RE: x4 OU
This tour is mainly to emphasize lower tiers, so we definitively aren’t doing this, at least not for this year

RE: Suspect slot
I want to emphasize that the point of this is not any tiering, it’s purely for fun and curiosity as oras ou hasn’t had major changes in years and many of its playerbase would love to see/try something new. I suspect (haha!) that oras ou players would actually enjoy this.

A flex slot for it makes it less tedious, while also having a middle ground between people who want more OU.

We are open to changing it though, not really set on it.

I’m not sure about AG, but there are other stuff too like CAP

RE: Monotype
This thing gets debated before and after every oras team tour lol. Being that this tour is focusing on lower tiers, it’s unlikely it doesn’t make it here. However I do think it’s very possible it doesn’t make it into ORASPL given how much push back it gets every time, despite some players liking it.
 
The AG playerbase doesn't seem to even like ORAS anyways for as long as I can remember them bashing it over SM. Doesn't make sense to add granted maybe they would join simply because it's AG. Monotype is okay, some of those stats above regarding Psychic is Mada spamming that type for every single game with no question or prep iirc from whichever tour I was helping in. Idk if that's a discussion for mono people separately if any real tiering needs to be done.

Initial format looks fine, the bo3 slot I dont think I liked too much when they ran it originally but maybe cause it was randomized every week. May be interesting to have two with Ubers, UU, RU then NU, PU, ZU for another.
 
gm

agree with cutting monotype personally, i think one of the reasons this format works so well for other tiers is that there is a smaller number of lower tiers to choose from each week(ss sm oras bw adv for RU vs potentially ubers uu ru nu pu zu mono doubles other fun slots.. its too much)

i dont have such a big opinion on doubles being a part of singles tours but it already has a place in oraspl anyway so i think its another reasonable tier to cut

instead of a suspect oras slot i would just consider adding another OU slot instead, i understand the previous iteration of this tournament was a means to have lower tiers shine but we already put lower tiers in oraspl anyway.. i think this should just be an oras tournament with no specific focus on lower tiers or OU as the format already does enough to differentiate it

basically i would advocate for still considering adding mono and doubles to oraspl but keeping them out of this tour and potentially having more OU slots

i think 2 managers is sufficient for a tour like this and selfbuys can be quite op and should be looked at with a bit of care
 
there was a little bit of oras burnout in the dou community last year on our end, would not be opposed to skipping this tour and giving the playerbase some time to recharge as long as we're guaranteed a slot in oraspl

e: not speaking for everyone obv but this was a pretty common sentiment among the dedicated players, we had something like 5 teamtours run oras dou in 2025 so we aren't hurting for a slot and if people are gonna gripe about including dou anyways then shrug
 
If there’s a slot open I will advocate for oras draft to be a contender. This is the gen draft started in and has an incredibly active player base. The draft forums oras cup which is a type b circuit tour has regularly eclipsed 500 sign ups over the last 3 years in just one week sign up periods. We are the second biggest forum in terms of tour sign ups behind OU.

Oras draft has been in team tours around 8 years now and the meta is very developed. It is very team tour compatible as seen in every draft team tour on the site. Recently there has become precedent for this idea as more smogon team tours have included draft slots. Recently NDCL included a draft slot which saw a non CA tour eclipse their CA tour in sign ups. Portugese Pl and a few other subs have also tried this and so far it’s seen nothing but success. Draft slot introduces a lot of collaboration, teambuilding expertise, and whole new skill sets to explore. I think this should be considered at least and feel free to reach out to me about any details either here or on discord. Logistically this is quite easy to pull off and multiple tours of late have shown this and the draft slot has been some of the most hyped games of those events.

Draft would be a great add to ORASCL.
 
As someone who started last year in both tours for mono, I think it's silly to specifically target it.
It's one of the tiers out the pool with the most active playerbase, popular tours to keep it active during the year, a lot of tools and very accessible for any singles player.
Using the "Psychic is dominant and spammed" argument is also dumb when half of the usage was straight up 1 player bringing it every week (me) and you can go to most of the other tiers and see how some mons have 50-60-70% usages (AG itself that got mentioned, Mono has more viable types than LC has viable mons lol), which isn't that big of a difference from a couple of types having an higher usage.
If ever, DOU is the tier that makes the least sense since it's the most different one for the singles players which are the main target of this tour, but I am not here to advocate to remove other tiers, as I think DOU is an okay addition to the tour/tier pools, but it would make much more sense to remove that than any other singles tier.
10 tiers is also not a bad number for the pool, going to 7-8 tiers means almost every week will be very very similar to the point where it's almost stupid to use a CL format, of course you don't want to put 15-20 random tiers as that can ruin the auction and the tour but 10 is a pretty great number.
 
none of the tiers holding this type of tournament have this many flex tiers, are they all stupid? lol

i dont feel strongly about mono being added or not and i think it and dou have a place in oraspl but having to account for all those lower tiers in draft while still having a solid plan for ou slots just seems like too much

would also love to have oras draft in oraspl too

edit: other cl tours have 8 flex slots i was just misinformed, my bad
 
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We can remove DOU @ the burnout thing. I appericate the honesty

I am hesitant to replace it with oras ou, and would prefer choosing oras ou-adjacent tiers like draft, suspect, or CAP. Another option could be to remove DOU and another tier (maybe monotype or suspect slot) from the tour completely without replacement, making the pool of tiers to choose from only 8 tiers instead of 10, which might make it easier overall. Would love to see more discussion on this. My only problem with draft is that it requires both experience and high level of engagement, which would be tough for a flex slot, forcing the team to dedicate at least one person for it, and potentially falling short if it was picked twice that weak. I do agree with LH that generally this tour works best with tiers that are most resembling of standard singles gameplay

Generally I'm more on board with this tour focusing on lower/OM tiers while oraspl focusing on OU (probably pushing for 4 OU slots this year instead of 3)

I'm also curious on capping managers to 1 or 40k for both as I can see self buys being abused in this tour simply because top level players can be more of a difference maker in this tour style
 
Hello,
I would like to support the addition of draft to this tournament. Draft is very competitive and fun to discuss, even when you are not a dedicated draft player. The draft community is also large and skilled enough, so you can easily find format lovers, and of course many tournament players also enjoy draft.

I believe this is a great opportunity for other tournament players and draft players to meet, share tiers they might become interested in (mainly OU), and, of course, help expand our player base.

Greetings.
 
i think if we decide to keep monotype and remove doubles from this edition then its reasonable to use this tour to try out draft for oraspl
but how would that work? would draft be one of the flex slots or a guaranteed play every week like the 2 ou?
 
keep monotype, add draft, dont add suspect.

suspect ou usually ends up being a mess and i think you'd need to have extremley dedicated (and really good) players in that slot for it to be worth considering. i dont think it would hurt to try it but these sort of tiers in tour and on ladder usually end up being very counter productive and need a lot more than just 9 weeks in a tournament to fully grasp any development.

edit - 8 teams would be a very nice change imo. im not sure if 3 managers per team is required but with the amount of tiers i dont think it would hurt but thats up to you guys.
 
I don't think theres an inherent issue with flex tours having a ton of possible options to choose from. With oldgen tours like these if you put tiers in a lot of the tiers mainers will sign up to have fun playing whatever their tier of choice is. It might be a decent amount to handle while picking tiers but I don't really think it would be much different than any other tour with flex slots just if like 2 more tiers than normal were included.

This being said, I am here to advocate for Draft. My proposed format is below:
8 teams for sure
OU
OU
Teams pick 4 of (I think you could go for 5 if you wanna make choosing tiers easier anyways and definently think the tour could support bo12)
Ubers
UU
RU
NU
PU
ZU
LC
ZU
Draft
Where flex tours really shine is helping bring more attention to other singles tiers besides CG, or in this tours case, ORAS OU. I don't really like the concept of doubles formats in tours like this and think they have a good spot in ORASPL. ORAS AG is probably chill but thats just a lot of natural overlap with the Ubers playerbase presumably where I don't really think it offers a whole lot. Suspect slot is also a meme

With that in mind, I think this makes it a pretty good tour for Draft to be included in. It can just be included with the rest of the flex tiers like normal I don't really think it deserves special treatment or anything. I don't see a whole lot of value in discussing anything beyond Draft's competitiveness and how it can into this tours format. As jscurf mentioned earlier, Draft has been trialed in a few mostly pretty small tours and the reception to it has seemed pretty chill so far. I'm willing to go into specific needs of draft with ORAS staff if we end up being included in the tournament, but the only real noticable change is we'll need some time after the auction to draft 2 or 3 teams, both have worked pretty fine historically in terms of draft team tour's. For ORAS this would probably take a few days and the week could go up early for more people to chill out and prepare for W1. Other than that, we like using a midseason period to make changes to our drafts. In other tours featuring drafts this usually just happens alongside a playing week to not take up space and it works perfectly fine if people wanna change their drafts a little bit. I'm happy to discuss more details with ORAS staff if wanted

Onto actual competitivenes now, the ORAS Draft playerbase is pretty competitive and the format is to. The better player and prepper ultimately wins a supermajority of the time. Of course I would advocate for picking Draft mainers but just about anyone can slot it and do well too. On paper for this the only challenging part really is the drafting phase, but any player can look at recent trends in the tiers tournaments and figure out a good way to combat them in the drafting phase. Other than that, prepping is like a little different because you are preparing for a specialized matchup but in some ways that just makes it easier to prepare for if you already have a good idea of what is coming and can plan and adjust your play accordingly to your opponent.

Cheers all, would love to see draft included
 
RE: 12 slots / 8 slots
I think 8 slots are out of the question. We really want more lower tiers per week.
For 12 slots, I do think this would be nice, but might be too much rn. 5 flex slots per team w/ 12 slots total may be smth we look into next year tho. If anybody wants to chime in feel free

RE: Draft
I discussed it with some draft people. I'm completely unbiased here and would be totally down with enough support/interest. Seems to me Draft might need either a week extra after auction or midseason, or both. I'm wondering if it's possible, like Hacker suggested, to do the drafting right after auction and during a playing week midseason so that it doesn't take any extra weeks. Tour is already long and exhuasting especially if we make it 8 teams, and the ORAS tour schedule is pretty packed, so I'd rather not have extra weeks.

I do want to push back on the idea that any player can slot in draft though. I think this may be somewhat true if there's a good draft support, but from my experience (i tried different draft tours back in the day), experienced draft players will easily farm non-draft players as it's a completely different game and prep. Maybe I was just really bad at it lol, but even as a prominent builder and player in ORAS OU I was just getting out teched by regular ass draft players.

Not an argument against it, but just to make sure people know what they're going into, especially as a flex slot. There's still plenty of room for discussion, but we can cut out DOU and replace it with draft as the tentative plan.

RE: Monotype/Suspect
Monotype/Suspect slots still up to debate to keep, remove, or replace. Removing only 1 of them seems a bit odd to me (having a pool of 9 tiers total instead of 8 or 10) but not really unreasonable. AG doesn't seem like a reasonable substitute given overlap with Ubers
 
So reading back over this, I wanted to agree with the idea of bringing it up to 8 teams. Underground may have only had 6 teams but I think especially with the custom avatar prize we are more likely to see more people signing up/hyped about this tour! I think the playerbase is there and with the CA and new format I think the hype will be there too!

Personally I don’t think a third manager slot is necessary here. I think the job can sufficiently be done with 2 managers and a third would probably function more like free support in most
cases… I’m not like super opposed but I don’t see a big reason to go above 2. I also like having the option for double self buys, as long as they are significantly expensive. Otherwise you run the risk of getting 1 true manager + 1 star
Player for “cheap.” You can have a good trio of managers on a team, but I just don’t see the need here.

I also like keeping ou at 2 slots instead of 3 or 4. In NU anyways part of the vision was for CL to be more of an old gens (lowers in this anology) focused format, while PL is more current gen focused (ou in this analogy) format. This brings contrast to the two different tours which I think it s great thing. With orascl as a successor to underground — a lowers forward tour — I think keeping ou at 2 slots keeps that same vision alive. While there may a different vision here (and it in no way has to be the same here) this is how I see it anyways! Looking forward to the tour!

Edit: I must have missed Ruffles post above responding to things but the opinions are still valid!
 
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Ive been somewhat silently in love with oras formats for the last year and I rlly like the proposed format however.

The 2 proposals ive read in this thread I agree most with are that 8 teams is flat out superior to 6 teams. Ive held thid opinion for every tour ive been part of but particularly for tours likes this one where its seemingly a gateway for future oraspl players. 8 teams allows a clearer playoffs picture, more room for players to get a shot, etc.

Additionally I like the proposal of dropping mono and dou in favor of 2 Additional OU slots. U cant rlly say this tour is any more low tier focused than pl because I dont see that as the point. I see this tour as the stepping stone to oraspl and thus I think showcasing as much ou talent without ditching the low tiers makes the most sense. And dou imo just doesn't fit and will complicate the already challenging task of drafting a CL format team.

2 cents added
 
giphy.gif

This is what it's like having to argue about Monotype every time there is a format discussion thread in this forum, be so fr...

Alpha1013 said:
These are some quick stats from the last ORASPL and Underground. I might’ve missed a few things since this was done manually.

The difference in type picks is pretty telling. Psychic alone was used 18 times, while the next closest is Water at 10. Dark sitting at 9 is probably a direct response to how dominant Psychic has been. Bug was literally used once , and that was by my team in ORASPL specifically to counter Psychic.

Given this, I honestly don’t see how this tier is justified having a slot right now. I’d strongly request the mods and host team to at least consider removing Monotype as an experiment for this tour, and replacing it with something like ORAS AG, which actually has an established and active player base.

as for some people who might say I used chat gpt or something - Yes I did to make it a bit cleaner :)

I want to be clear that I don’t have anything against the Monotype community. However, if Monotype is being included despite being heavily matchup-based and dominated by the same few types over and over, then I don’t see why AG shouldn’t be included as well. AG has solid resources, a good and growing player-base, one of the strongest old-gen AG formats, and it’s genuinely fun to play.
Click to expand...
This is up there for one of the worst posts I have ever seen, you want to remove Monotype because some types are considered better than others...? Just like every tier has some playstyles and some Pokemon that are better than the others.... I guess we should remove every tier then and be left with nothing? If you want to make a case for AG, do it on the tier's own merits instead of nothingburger arguments.

Already made a post here in the past, but to reiterate, Monotype has generally had good pools and good showings in the tournaments it's been included. It is extremely silly that this conversation is entertained by a select group of people every year, especially when the arguments are so terrible. It's very frustrating having to go through this every year, when Monotype has consistently been a good addition to the tour.

I don't think 9 tiers to pick from is that much of an issue. NU has done 8 for two years now, and it's gone very well, so it shouldn't be too different from that with the addition of just one more tier. Suspect slot should not be included, though, especially if it is gonna be one Pokemon unbanned every week rotating; I believe this has been tried before, and it has led to nothing and will just be a waste of a slot.

12 slots with Draft also included would be ideal if mods and hosts can figure out the logistics of adding Draft to this format, but otherwise the format proposed on the OP without the suspect slot is good (Ubers, UU, RU, NU, PU, ZU, LC, DOU, Monotype); no reason to remove any tiers.
 
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