The tried-and-true tiering system we all know and love has generally done a pretty good job organizing Pokémon by competitive viability. In an ideal world, there would be at least one metagame in at least one generation where your favorite Pokémon is considered a viable choice for your team. Something I've always had fun observing, though, are those unique cases where a Pokémon you wouldn't expect to perform well suddenly finds a valuable niché in a higher tier than where it's actually ranked. On some Viability Rankings threads I've seen over the years, sometimes these Pokémon are even considered more viable than the Pokémon actually listed within that same tier. A notable example of this is how the Past Gens OU community started to re-organize the Pokémon Showdown team builder by expanding the "OU by technicality" classification to include Pokémon no longer suitable for the modern metagames.
I've had a lot of interesting takes as of late, many of which I haven't posted about pretty much out of embarrassment, and as such, I've been trying to learn more about competitive Pokémon history over the past couple of weeks in an effort to improve as a player and hopefully increase my enjoyment of the game overall. I thought having a thread where we discussed examples of Pokémon that fit higher metagames could be one of the many ways myself and other newer players could increase our knowledge of these games and what makes each generation of Pokémon unique from one another.
By my standards, this OP is pretty straight to the point because I don't have that much to go over. The only clarification I feel I still need to make is what exactly I mean by a "higher tier", since there are a few ways one could define that. Historically, OU has been seen as standard play, while UU, RU, NU, PU, et cetera have been seen as progressively lower tiers compared to each of the previous ones. I have nothing wrong with this concept, but I also want to acknowledge BL metagames as well as Ubers and Anything Goes. While unofficial tiers and banlists usually receive less play than official tiers, these classifications do have their own smaller communities as well that I'd like to pay respects to for the purpose of this thread. As such, for this thread I'll be considering BL metagames as a sort of "in-between" the tier above and below it, while continuing to consider Ubers and Anything Goes as they've always been.
If you've read this far, thank you very much for your time, and let's dive right into this discussion. Does anyone have any examples they would like to, for the lack of a better word, "nominate" to start this off?
I've had a lot of interesting takes as of late, many of which I haven't posted about pretty much out of embarrassment, and as such, I've been trying to learn more about competitive Pokémon history over the past couple of weeks in an effort to improve as a player and hopefully increase my enjoyment of the game overall. I thought having a thread where we discussed examples of Pokémon that fit higher metagames could be one of the many ways myself and other newer players could increase our knowledge of these games and what makes each generation of Pokémon unique from one another.
By my standards, this OP is pretty straight to the point because I don't have that much to go over. The only clarification I feel I still need to make is what exactly I mean by a "higher tier", since there are a few ways one could define that. Historically, OU has been seen as standard play, while UU, RU, NU, PU, et cetera have been seen as progressively lower tiers compared to each of the previous ones. I have nothing wrong with this concept, but I also want to acknowledge BL metagames as well as Ubers and Anything Goes. While unofficial tiers and banlists usually receive less play than official tiers, these classifications do have their own smaller communities as well that I'd like to pay respects to for the purpose of this thread. As such, for this thread I'll be considering BL metagames as a sort of "in-between" the tier above and below it, while continuing to consider Ubers and Anything Goes as they've always been.
If you've read this far, thank you very much for your time, and let's dive right into this discussion. Does anyone have any examples they would like to, for the lack of a better word, "nominate" to start this off?
Replays of Cofagrigus:
Replays of Vanilluxe:
