Discussion Scrafty in ORAS RU

DugZa · Jun 24, 2024

With RUPL almost concluding, I've decided to open a discussion on Scrafty in ORAS RU (with approval from RU tier leaders). For the past couple of years, Scrafty has slowly turned into a highly controversial Pokemon within the tier; especially with its Dragon Dance sets gaining more and more traction in recent years. From my personal experience of playing and building the tier in two different RUPLs, it is not farfetched to say that Scrafty is the most straining Pokemon to account for in the builder. This is most in part due to its ability to run a myriad of different sets; Dragon Dance + 3 attacks, Bulky Dragon Dance + STABs + Substitute/Rest, and Bulk Up sets with Rest among others, have all been used to decent success — all of which mandate slightly different counterplay and there not being a single reliable catch-all counterplay option.

Fairy-types are usually considered the "best" Scrafty counterplay available; however, Diancie is easily dealt with by Iron Head while Granbull does a better job, it is still on a strict timer once its item has been knocked off and mandates Wish support to be consistently effective against Scrafty which can restrict team building options with it. While Mega Audino (and Aromatisse) can do a decent job at dealing with Scrafty, their reliance on Wish leave them easy to take advantage of. Roseli Berry Scrafty has also been used to decent success on more offensively-oriented teams to comfortably deal with the aforementioned Fairy-types. We saw Pokemon like Mawile and Vileplume being used in this RUPL and they are fairly reliable Scrafty counterplay but if you have to dig deep and use a Pokemon from PU that has pretty much no other use or niche outside of dealing with Scrafty and Vileplume which is worse than Venusaur in every other way then it just further supports my point about Scrafty's overbearing presence. Aside from the Fairy-types, its other usual defensive checks are Pokemon such as Venusaur, Golbat and Fletchinder; the surge of Substitute Scrafty sets have easily put non-Growth Venusaur out of commission as a reliable Scrafty check and even otherwise, +1 Zen Headbutt has a very favorable roll to 2HKO Venusaur (easy 2HKO if rocks are up) while Golbat and Fletchinder can easily be pressured with Stealth Rocks (and they are not very common either). There have been some attempts to use Pokemon like Helmet + Sticky Hold Gastrodon with Clear Smog that can do a decent job at dealing with DD + Drain Punch sets but they still struggle against any HJK variants.

However, Scrafty does have a very middling speed tier which in turn leads to some teams resorting to offensive counter-play like Aerodactyl, Sneasel, Virizion or Choice Scarf Pokemon like Emboar, Flygon, and Drapion to deal with it. That said, these Pokemon are far from reliable ways to deal with it as firstly, none of them can switch in safely against it, secondly, they can only come in so many times throughout a game as they lack reliable recovery most of the time and lastly, most of them can't even reliably revenge kill it unless it's significantly chipped due to its naturally great defensive stats. All this to say that with all the possible Scrafty sets it's nigh impossible to account for everything and be well prepared against any potential Scrafty set at preview and guessing the wrong Scrafty set and making the wrong switch could immediately end the game then and there. Having access to good Wish passers in the tier doesn't make it any better because Scrafty can just break through half the team, switch out, and come back in for another round back at full HP. Having tier staples like Registeel and Alomomola that consistently give it free entry doesn't help either. Status is usually one of the most reliable ways to deal with any offensive threat but Shed Skin renders this useless against Scrafty so the counter-play options dwindle further.

Below are a few replays of Scrafty proving to be overbearing within the tier. Just to be clear I do not want the rest of the thread to focus on these replays, they are just there to give a general idea about how dominant Scrafty is within the tier and yes, obviously some of the games weren't played perfectly but the general idea stands so please don't reply to this post just to point out all the misplays made by the opponents in each replay.

Tagging some players who have played the tier at a high level (plus anyone else I know who follows the tier closely) to share their thoughts on the matter and hopefully get rid of Scrafty from the tier! (sorry if I missed anyone but feel free to share your thoughts anyway.)

I would also like this thread to be solely focused on just Scrafty's role within the ORAS RU and not be derailed by any other discussions about any other Pokemon.

EviGaro · Jun 24, 2024

This discussion has come up a lot and started when ORAS was the current gen, with someone getting a RU forum ban over Moonblast Vileplume, to Shake singing the praises of Tickle Alomomola and ChillShadow calling me an idiot over insisting Clefairy can beat Scrafty (before losing to it in ORAS Cup), but tbh my opinion on it has never changed from those days and I don't really think it deserves action.

The Scrafty problem in large part is an ORAS problem at large, where people mostly run one style of team with some variations, but nothing that really breaks this specific mold. This makes Scrafty worse as a problem because it is also the one style of team where Scrafty is the most dangerous against. Another point in its favour: it's a really good Pursuit abuser. This has always been a crippling flaw in the fat wear-you-down balance playstyle because Pursuit is mandatory for those builds, which then opens you up to potential wincons because those teams are not constructed in a way that allows you to react offensively to pressure. This is the same reason why my decade old Omastar builds still gets me random tags about it winning games. It's built on that one specific concept and abuses it.

And if I look at the type of innovation against Scrafty you talked about, it's pretty telling of this hypothesis: people really struggle to think outside of that one archetype and only creates themselves more problems by 1 - going more and more niche in the Scrafty counterplay, potentially making their team worse against the meta and 2 - completely surrendering any initiative to their opponent. From what I have seen, and the replays seem to show this, is that people have completely given up on the idea to lure Scrafty and try to instead beat it with more fat mons, but that's never been super reliable. Scrafty ended up dropping a fair amount from its "potentially broken" status because it couldn't ever run into a team without a Dazzling Gleam lure, which you would see on: Meloetta, Uxie, Mesprit, Jellicent, Lanturn, Xatu... And then you had your bulky balance breakers that rose in popularity, like the well known BU Braviary and the more fallen SD Torterra. Scrafty can have a bit of a tough time vs those depending on set, especially if it's already taken a hit. And then you had Scarfers that could actually damage it. So people just got discouraged of using it because the meta was not going its way. For example, in RUPL 2018 it was picked seven times the whole tour, 2017 doesn't have the whole tour ROFL but was way down in usage - completely dropped for about half the weeks - and not used in finals either.

Also, not all these mons would be bad now too, btw. Uxie is still fat with good pivoting and an useful knock, and gives a team good momentum vs a lot of faster options that don't really know how to damage it. It's one mon oddly enough Scrafty never liked switching against, same as the other similar balance breaker in Malamar. Mesprit has always been way more niche but it's a rocker that punishes Venusaur more offensively, a rarity in the tier. Lanturn handles Magneton, one of the most important breakers and pivoters, with ease. Xatu owns. Jellicent also owns (but does want wisp and taunt more often, yes), Torterra... man I still see so many teams that just fold to SD Lum Torterra.

I know I know, you said you wanted to avoid talking about other mons.... But to me it's impossible to address the current state of ORAS RU without talking about the absolute dearth of creativity in the tier. Hitmonlee is a super effective breaker with HJK Double Edge Knock essentially having no true counter, but outside of my one team you basically never see it anymore. And yet, Scrafty hates going against it regardless of which set it is because it forces it to consider Chople, which is generally awkward as a failsafe against teams that will pressure it. I talked about Torterra before, there's offensive mons like Jolteon (does over half to standard DD with Tbolt, so can manage good scenarios and is not useless vs fat either since its faster than bulky Flygon unlike Mag) or Aerodactyl (was in the replays once, but like Aerial Ace does a ton to Scrafty). Clawitzer still has no effective counter, and without HJK Scrafty cannot ko that from full. Qwilfish and Garbodor are still very good spikes users. None of those scenarios would make a Scrafty sweep impossible obviously and you do allude to that, but it's already a bit flawed when you see a bulky balance using one random offensive mon which happens a bit too often. Hell, if you are using Scarf Flygon just put Superpower on it, it would have saved one game in the replays at least and it has the moveslot but anyway-

This random tangent does bring me to an actual point though: What purpose would a Scrafty ban actually serve? Typically, a mon being overwhelming makes it near impossible to run the builds its best against, but Scrafty being in the tier doesn't stop everyone from running the one archetype that is vulnerable to Scrafty. So we would be making those fat balances... better and lazier? How is this desirable? How does it make ORAS RU more open to newcomers, to different ideas? New things rose as Scrafty was previously dropping in usage and certainly we are now back in a Scrafty era, but we also see way less offensive teams than we used to. I completely get that it's difficult to innovate when, unlike current gen, the opportunities to play the meta are not all that and so you want to rely on... well, reliable stuff. But to me that's why I would rather seek changes to that gen by looking at the banlist first, and then move on from there. ORAS RUBL certainly served a purpose at the time, but there's been plenty of discussions about how we could reevaluate this and bring people into that decision making process. Because, again, I see an effort to revitalize the tier in a similar lens a Scrafty discussion would go, except with that I can clearly see what the endgame of such a move would be.

FlamPoke · Jun 24, 2024

Going to use some quantifiable data (not necessarily good quantifiable data) to kind of elaborate on the intent of DugZa's post.
Spoiler Warning: we're about to look at usage and win-rate statistics:

Pokemon	Usage Count	Win Count	Win %
Flygon	46	23	50.00%
Registeel	33	18	54.55%
Venusaur	32	17	53.13%
Alomomola	19	11	57.89%
Sneasel	19	9	47.37%
Scrafty	16	11	68.75%
Drapion	16	7	43.75%
Slowking	14	6	42.86%
Magneton	11	2	18.18%
Granbull	11	7	63.64%
Diancie	8	5	62.50%
Jellicent	8	4	50.00%
Glalie	8	4	50.00%
Virizion	7	3	42.86%
Uxie	7	2	28.57%
Sigilyph	7	4	57.14%
Braviary	6	5	83.33%
Gallade	6	2	33.33%
Aerodactyl	4	1	25.00%
Barbaracle	4	3	75.00%
Qwilfish	4	2	50.00%
Steelix	3	1	33.33%
Emboar	3	2	66.67%
Audino	3	0	0.00%
Banette	3	2	66.67%
Ditto	3	2	66.67%
Xatu	3	1	33.33%
Garbodor	3	3	100.00%
Hitmonlee	3	2	66.67%
Seismitoad	2	1	50.00%
Roselia	2	1	50.00%
Accelgor	2	2	100.00%
Mawile	2	1	50.00%
Fletchinder	2	2	100.00%
Omastar	2	1	50.00%
Cinccino	2	0	0.00%
Camerupt	2	2	100.00%
Rhyperior	2	0	0.00%
Rotom-Mow	2	0	0.00%
Vileplume	1	0	0.00%
Typhlosion	1	0	0.00%
Cofagrigus	1	1	100.00%
Linoone	1	0	0.00%
Archeops	1	1	100.00%
Druddigon	1	0	0.00%
Absol	1	0	0.00%
Hoopa	1	1	100.00%
Liepard	1	0	0.00%
Malamar	1	0	0.00%
Golbat	1	0	0.00%
Bronzong	1	1	100.00%
Victreebel	1	0	0.00%
Jolteon	1	1	100.00%
Hariyama	1	0	0.00%
Clawitzer	1	0	0.00%
Escavalier	1	0	0.00%
Smeargle	1	0	0.00%
Grand Total	348	174	50.00%

I used the provided Usage Statistics to compile the entire seasons worth of ORAS usage- and win-rates to see if any notable discrepancies exist, notably pertaining to Scrafty, and to put it simply... they kinda do. Scrafty tied Drapion for 6th in total usage but had an astounding 68.75% win-rate, considerably ahead of other top-usage mons like Flygon, Registeel, and Venusaur. Other mons like Granbull and Diancie also had great win-rates, illustrating the metagame isn't just "who's Venu is better".

Now, win-rate is by no means a definitive metric worth using as a standalone premise to structure tiering principles around, lest we ban Bronzong and Jolteon given their 100% win-rates. Instead, we should qualify what the data says by using the perspectives and opinions of notable ORAS RU players such as DugZa and the other RUPL participants. Given DugZa created this post in the hopes of removing Scrafty, I do wonder what the best course of action is moving forward - for reference, there were eight starting ORAS slots for RUPL, plus some notable names who started in other tiers, plus some other noteworthy tours like Cups/RUGL/etc. to consider... The 'qualified' player pool to consider is probably 30+ players deep (DugZa tagged 29 alone), enough to put out a survey with action being tied to results?

fran17 · Jun 25, 2024

I think stats here are misleading. The Scrafty winrate is not so high because he's this tremendous monster of power but like Evi said it just destroys the common RegiVenuGon cores, he always done that. Braviary this RUPL went 5/6 (its only loss was against a team that didnt have venuregigon core) and it's another huge problem for those type of teams.
Scrafty has never been an issue back when oras was the maingen because people tended to play still the common bulky cores but there was an higher usage of strong rkiller and overall strong offensive mons, whlist this season the top10 in usage was composed by 6 passive mons and 3 setup fodders for Scrafty, with the last mon present here being Scrafty itself, it's easy for Scrafty to sweep most of the time in these conditions.
The thing i liked the most in oras ru back in the days when I mained it was the possibility of being able to play with sub-par mons and still being able to pull it out because the bulky cores always made their job. Please insted of complaining about Scrafty's effectivness in doing its job abandon the comfort zone and try to pull out funnier teams, the meta and the games will benefit a lot from it

HANTSUKI · Jun 25, 2024

Why would we ban Scrafty? So the metagame can just sit on a single archetype and be even more boring with no interesting matchups at all? It's important to keep strong threats for all archetypes so we can achieve some level of diversity. Scrafty makes those fat cores either work their shit and get creative trying out new ideas, or just accept the L if they're going to be lazy.

I'm not even a super high skilled player in the tier, but I managed to make finals of that ORAS RU Cup by accident because people would just recycle the same stuff over and over. My teams were mostly focused on abuse the same cores people love to spam and Sneasel in particular (Drum Hariyama the goat, Pursuit Bait + Scrafty etc). Yes, I used A LOT of Scrafty but I think I was fine against opposite Scrafties in general so never felt like a problem to me. It is a hard mon to build against if you stick to the same archetypes tho, that's some truth.

I also clicked in the first replay to check how much Scrafty is being a problem for other people and in the replay Scrafty managed to get a late game sweep after its counterplays where toxic'd or mid HP. Oh wow, a sweeper managed to do its job after the conditions were met. Who would imagine it? (also the Camerupt lost HP to an unlucky poison)

To me ORAS RU managed to get into a state of perfect balance. It is even TOO MUCH balanced for my taste actually. By the middle of ORAS RU Cup I was already bored and tried out everything I wanted at the time. Banning Scrafty would make it even worse lmao

If we are going to look into changing the tier, we should look at the already enourmous ban list (like REALLY, I got surprised when I just checked it LOOOL) and consider dropping something. Otherwise, let it keep its current state because it'll probably never be better than that without changing too much the tier's identity.

tl;dr keep Scrafty, people losing too much to it is skill issue/laziness in the builder

atomicllamas · Jun 25, 2024

Brought this up in the discord but also want to point out Scrafty went 7-0 in weeks 1 and 2. Then Scrafty went 4-5, my assumption is a lot of “comfort zone” teams were used initially and the old standards match up pretty poorly into scrafty (considering they are likely a lot of venu regi gon teams). Scrafty punishes fat balance that aims to make progress by knocking / spreading status and that typically has Flygon as its second strongest attacker. Once people moved away from this (or maybe scrafty just wasn’t pulling those match ups) its record was fine, but not incredible.

I also don’t think the right move in ORAS RU is to make the tier more friendly to passive balance (insert who has the better venu joke). Scrafty is decent on offense and much less good into offense, I think that encouraging offense in the tier is a good thing.

Miyami~~~ · Jun 28, 2024

seconding evi here, I think ORAS RU has a laziness problem more than it has a scrafty/venu/insertothermonhere problem. Scrafty just happens to be the best of a series of breakers or setup sweepers that completely folds the lazy regi/venu/gon/water/+2 we're all guilty of repeating endlessly. Most of those cores are going to lose to basically any setup mon with a STAB Knock Off(/honorary stab knock off gallade) since the main knock switchins are bulky Venu and Mola/Slowking, none of which are equipped to take boosted knock offs by anything. SD Drapion is immune to toxic/sludge poisons naturally and often runs lum to dodge a scald burn while 2hkoing king. SD Sneasel and Absol do admittedly fear the 30% chance of burns but do enough damage to where they only need a single turn of setup and are naturally strong enough to force switches and give themselves those turns. Even Hitmonlee with no setup can be a real pain if it's reckless since it's strong enough to back up its knocks with the ability to 2hko or better that entire core. This isn't a unique scrafty thing, Scrafty just happens to be the easiest way to do it. I remember arguments to ban Braviary and Gallade for basically the same reasons as this.

Here's some things you can do to get your creative juices flowing and not lose to scrafty anywhere near as often:

1) Run Fairies
This feels very obvious but because the best fairy is a rocker and the cookie cutter build always runs registeel it kind of gets overlooked. Diancie is still a top 10 mon in the tier and beats most sets except for Iron Head, and if it's running Iron Head it can't run rest to outlast a poison in the back (Leech Venu + Diancie is a top tier core still!). Same deal with megadino which has been super underrated in general. Aromatisse is still around, the main reason for its tumble down the VR was competition from mola and megadino, but given that it's the strongest anti-scrafty fairy that isn't fucking togetic that could change. It's still a good mon at fulfilling its job. You could even make a case for Mawile, since it shuts down scrafty and other terrifying mons like Sneasel or hitmonlee and was ranked for most of oras ru's life as a cg.

2) Poisons are good too
piggybacking off the last one. Scrafty needs rest or sub to beat Venusaur efficiently, especially if it's leech seed, and if it's doing that then it can't handle fairies nearly as effectively. Venusaur is still the best mon in the tier and fits on a ton of teams, but RU actually does have other poisons too. Weezing's been trending upwards a bit and has enough space for Clear Smog to stall it out. Qwilfish runs haze and/or dbond anyways. Garbodor can also fit clear smog and otherwise seriously dents it with gunk or drain punch, the latter of which it occasionally runs anyways so it can stay in on regi and rack up chip damage. Golbat doesn't mind knock that much and beats most every scraft set, nobody runs zen headbutt. It's pretty easy to bake these into your balance cores along with a fairy to naturally cover most every scrafty set since it can't viably run rest and coverage.

3) Be more careful when building with waters
I think Scrafty gets a lot of free matchups right now since the laziest way to play the tier is just to slap on regivenugon + water + 2, and that water usually being King or Mola, which are the two bulky waters it has the easiest time setting up against. Adding onto this is that the +2 are usually dark, fighting, or psychic types that aren't designed to take knock (sneasel + melo, for instance) and Venusaur ends up being the only scrafty check on most of these teams almost by default. As such, it's really easy to spec scrafty to beat exactly venusaur and watch the rest of the team come crumbling down behind it. I've mentioned this a lot throughout this post but pairing a fairy that forces coverage and a poison that forces rest on the same team lets you catch-22 scrafty and stops it from using king and mola for free setup opportunities, and a lot of them would really appreciate being paired with king or mola, even. If you are gonna run regimola with no fairy, maybe don't auto venu and go for a poison that handles scrafty even better like Garbodor or Golbat instead of committing to the standard. There are also other waters in the tier (shocker), and most of them have better anti-scrafty measures than King and Mola do. Colbur Gleam Jellicent's been around for a while, and Gleam isn't even just a scrafty thing since it's the only move Jellicent has that lets it not be setup bait for sub bu gallade. Lanturn is already a decent anti-cookie cutter mon since Flygon hates getting burned and has the space for Gleam too so scrafty can't use it as setup bait. Poliwrath is cute and comes with a lot of defensive utility. It's one of the best switchins to knock in the entire tier, hard counters sneasel drapion et al, and comes with a neat scald immunity and resttalk to make it a really good status absorber. If you want to not run a core outside of your water that handles scrafty defensively, make sure your water can also handle scrafty defensively or at least not be a completely free entry point for it.

4) Colbur lures
compared to the other setup knockers scrafty actually isn't that strong and isn't capable of blowing through colbur mons like Sneasel or Absol can. This normally isn't a problem when the only Colbur mon on cookie cutter balance is Slowking, which isn't capable of seriously harming scrafty back unless it gets insanely lucky with scald and shed skin rolls going its way, but there's plenty of other colbur psychics that can. Uxie is still a top mon and was 100% dropped too far since cookie cutter runs registeel pretty much always. It doesn't even need to be your rocker since it also gets heal bell and can do that just fine, and has enough bulk to take repeated knocks with wish support. Mesprit trades Uxie's bulk for gleam just ohkoing scrafty outright, and being a rocker that actually threatens venusaur is pretty valuable overall. Xatu has a free moveslot and can go colbur air slash if you need to, on top of just being a good mon all around. Even Sigilyph can take a hit after colbur and just kill it if you need to. None of these except maybe Uxie with wish support should be your only answer to scrafty, but all of them are worth considering on teams a lot more than they get right now. Even Xatu hasn't shown up too much in pl/gl this season since people are that into cookie cutter right now.

none of these individually are perfect counters, but combining two of them that lose to different scrafty sets instead of just reaching for regivenugon over and over will increase your winrate against it with balanced or defensive teams, or we could all adapt by running more offensive teams as has happened in the past when scraft or brav or gallade or whoever has felt overbearing.

ps don't free the guys except for shuckle it's not needed

MrAldo · Jun 28, 2024

The thread has to be lowkey a joke when Scrafty encourages consideration into making better building decisions and not just resorting to your standard regivenuwater flygon balance that Scrafty punishes, AND people still resort to that anyways cause it is the comfort zone of the tier. The tier has the tools to handle Scrafty pretty sufficiently not just by resorting to AHEM Vileplume and Mawile

Pulling up stats on such a small sample is honestly baffling. Yes, it is the higher tier of players or whatever but VERY FEW of these actively look of analyzing trends and punishing people for their choices instead and just go into their discord and say "hey, whats good in this tier?" The common response is Venu fat, and they are like "Sure, pass that shit, dont have time to be thinking about this anyways" and that alone just skews the results, people in an "important" tournament arent going to try to innovate and have hardly any connection to the tier to do so, only players that went through that tier, that are a select few, have that level of connection, which is sad cause it is a good tier that reward pretty much everything that people like to call "good skills" on a player, like patience and proper positioning.

There are fairies, running gleam on a couple of things to prevent it from getting out of hand, fat fighters like big pig and even hariyama can trade with the right bulk and have big value in dealing with mega glalie. Other waters do have their shortcomings compared to slowking or jellicent or Alomomola in their respective roles, but many like Poliwrath still have good value with the tank or rest talk set.

In the end, Scrafty is by no lie the most consistent threat in the ORAS RU metagame, but it provides a necessary presence that demands the bulky balance to adjust and promote at least some semblance of variety. Promoting more stagnation and lazy building isnt something I wanna see promoted in a tier I really REALLY like. Either adjust, use Ditto as a backup plan, or keeping losing to Scrafty and go cry about how broken it is or something, but dont commit the mistake of getting rid of it

Now can we stop making this threads about changing an old gen lower tier, pretending we know stuff about it, and think the changes are positive when people arent gonna play it seriously until next important RU tournament JUST to reuse teams anyways? Thanks in advance

Floss · Jun 29, 2024

EviGaro said:
From what I have seen, and the replays seem to show this, is that people have completely given up on the idea to lure Scrafty and try to instead beat it with more fat mons, but that's never been super reliable. Scrafty ended up dropping a fair amount from its "potentially broken" status because it couldn't ever run into a team without a Dazzling Gleam lure, which you would see on: Meloetta, Uxie, Mesprit, Jellicent, Lanturn, Xatu... And then you had your bulky balance breakers that rose in popularity, like the well known BU Braviary and the more fallen SD Torterra. Scrafty can have a bit of a tough time vs those depending on set, especially if it's already taken a hit. And then you had Scarfers that could actually damage it.

The increase in the usage of the Substitute set, which is able to exploit most Venusaur sets and offer Scrafty more chances to set-up, makes it hard to feel confident in checks that are reliant on one-time use berries, such as most of the ones you listed. This is one of the reasons I feel people are generally relying on fatter Fairies that can switch in multiple times, rather than using DGleam lures which are wasting a moveslot otherwise and might still be ineffective into Scrafty. You listed a bunch of other offensive mons that don't rely on Colbur, like Hitmonlee and Aerodactyl, but most of them are also predicated on beating Scrafty in a straight-up scenario (unlikely to happen in an actual game unless the opponent's already lost) and can't switch into it easily if it is exploiting another mon.

EviGaro said:
This random tangent does bring me to an actual point though: What purpose would a Scrafty ban actually serve? Typically, a mon being overwhelming makes it near impossible to run the builds its best against, but Scrafty being in the tier doesn't stop everyone from running the one archetype that is vulnerable to Scrafty. So we would be making those fat balances... better and lazier? How is this desirable? How does it make ORAS RU more open to newcomers, to different ideas? New things rose as Scrafty was previously dropping in usage and certainly we are now back in a Scrafty era, but we also see way less offensive teams than we used to.

I think you aren't giving enough consideration to why most of these balances end up oriented towards the more defensive end, especially since I feel like the reason for the shift to more of these fatter comps is due to Scrafty itself. To reliably check the Substitute set defensively, you have to usually use Granbull/Diancie/another Fairy, which can easily stomach both STABs and threaten to OHKO back. The issue with these mons is that they can easily get chipped down after Knock removes Leftovers, which leads to the obvious solution of using WishPass like Alomomola to keep your Fairy healthy. Miyami did bring up the possibility of using mons like M-Audino and Aromatisse which can encompass the cleric role and Scrafty check while maintaining recovery to themselves with Wish, but these mons are easily exploitable by other teams and usually end up as liabilities against comps without Scrafty.

At this point, your team has 2 slots used on defensively inclined mons, without having a Steel type, Ground type, speed control, hazards control... not to forget, the best mon in the tier in Venusaur. If you end up using the standard Flygon/Registeel/Venusaur core to encompass all of these roles (and relying on Scarf Defog Flygon as your removal at that point), you only have 1 slot left for a truly offensive mon, which concludes in the composition of these fat balances we are saying today. There are some other posts which are saying banning Scrafty would enable passive balances a lot more, but from my experience these passive balances are being generated by Scrafty's presence and removing it might go some way in allowing for more offensive creativity on these kind of teams. Of course, this is a bit theoretical, so something similar to the system used for Talonflame in SM RU could be useful? Suspect tours and a forum tour without the mon would give us some more insight into how the metagame looks like when Scrafty isn't there.

MrAldo said:
...

While everyone else has tried to make a constructive effort to engage in the discussion of Scrafty's future in ORAS RU (and I have done my best to reciprocate that in the first half of my post), I'm inclined to treat this with the same respect as it had towards the original poster, which is none at all. Did you even bother reading the post DugZa made, since he already listed most of the stuff you mentioned yourself as Scrafty checks? Or did you just see the thread title and decide to stomp on over to do your best impression of an old man yelling at people to get off his lawn, given you said someone who was actively building the tier in the last RUPL (and successful at it) was 'pretending to know stuff about it'? Considering the fact that this thread was made partly due to the surge of Sub Scrafty sets this RUPL making it harder to check than ever before, saying something like 'just run Ditto lol!' seems wholly ignorant of what you're responding to. Taking potshots at someone for pulling up stats is also uncalled for, especially since their post specifically says win-rate is not a definitive metric and opinions of the people who played the tier very much matter.

As for my own view on Scrafty, I'm not fully sure on whether I would vote Ban if we had a suspect now (although that seems unlikely anyways). While the general trend of the metagame seems concerning, if ultra-fat balances or HOs end up the only choices to effectively combat the mon, some experimentation might be able to derail its hold on the metagame while also expanding options. I ended up switching to ORAS RU for the last few weeks of our RUPL, and realised that Fairies with some sort of recovery was the best way to manage Scrafty for balances. My solution to free up room for offensively inclined mons ended up being dropping Venusaur, and it served me well for the couple of weeks that I tried it. I'm not convinced this is entirely effective in the long run, and think exploring a metagame without Scrafty could be a worthwhile endeavor. To that end, as I mentioned earlier, something similar to the set-up used to consider Talonflame in SM RU could also be applied here, if we want to know what kind of effects losing Scrafty would have on the metagame.

LBN · Jun 29, 2024

Personally, I find scrafty incredibly obnoxious in the builder and playing vs it, even without using standard regimola shit (which truthfully, I don't do particularly often primarily because I find it boring and recycling the same sauceless team is like joining an oras ubers game and loading that mewtwo screens sample, nty), It feels like a pain in the ass to navigate because of how good it matches up vs alot of the best mons, which even when you are being creative in the builder, the odds of you having nothing that scrafty can abuse is REALLY low. Venusaur, alomomola, defog flygon and registeel are nearly omnipresent, and slowking, jellicent, and drapion aren't doing any better on the matter. Truthfully speaking, I think scrafty does have the performance, and numbers to justify the discussion of action on it.

HOWEVER, I do not think that's the most ideal move to make. While I loathe scrafty and think it's a corny presence in a tier where most of the fairies suck ass (im sorry diancie is NOT good like that, and granbull is lucky it has thunder wave to atleast function as a good para spreader), and Mega Audino suffers from opportunity cost to not run superior megas like Glalie or Camerupt to actually take the battle somewhere. I do feel bad for DugZa, because this conversation about looking into unbans was only really sparked a week before he made this thread, and nobody actually told him until afterwards. I also feel bad because I'm going to shift away from discussing Scrafty as action for the rest of my post, as I do believe scrafty is a victim of playerbase laziness, and in part can be alleviated through other means. If these means are not agreed upon though, I do think nuking scrafty into oblivion is a fine thing to discuss, if you guys want fatbreakers we have far more than scrafty on offer and preserving it because it "messes with the generic shit" is not a valid reason to not ban something. If you want to discuss numbers like flam and fran did that's fine, but punishing regimola squads is not a reason to do nothing, especially when we have things like Braviary, Gallade, and others that do that role just as well.

Now, for the discussions of unbanning things, I'm going to roll a bit with how the discord has been discussing it, while posting each reasonable candidate for action in order of reasonability. Discord has been heavily on the side of unbanning things, and while that wasn't the purpose of this thread, the discussion towards unbans has been more favored in general so I'd rather focus attention that aspect instead. Personally, I think the discussion of bolstering options vs Regimola is a good one, and 2 pokemon in particular stand out as potential options.

I think shuckle is leaps and bounds the easiest unban of all of them. The tiers primary defogger is immune to webs, which heavily restricts how you go about restricting defogging, limiting options to things like Defiant Braviary, Contrary Malamar, faster taunters like Mismagius and honestly not much else. Of course, not every team will and should have flygon, while that ignores potential things like Xatu blanking shuckle completely on preview without some form of pursuit support. Scrafty thrives in a fatty enviroment, and Shuckle thrives in an offensive one. A defensive one, it's hard to justify sticky webs as a means of HO playstyle, and giving us that option could provide new variety to the tier and I think we would be foolish not to atleast give this thing a try.

After shuckle though, things start to pick up a notch in terms of volatility. Shuckle is frankly, a pokemon i can forsee having the potential to outright suck, but the rest are more likely to be broken. That being said.

I think Noivern would be the most impactful unban we could consider. A huge speed tier; faster than Scrafty at +1 in fact. Stallbreaking potential with Taunt helmet, and solid firepower with Draco/Cane/Flamethrower coverage. However, it's weak to hazards and lacks good synergy with our primary removal of Flygon, or really any removal actually, and lacks defog of it's own to alleviate this. Additionally, it's preyed on and forced out by Sneasel and other underrated pokemon like Aurorus, Piloswine, Ice shard Glalie, and would give diancie something to do. Faster pokemon also exist like Aerodactyl, Jolteon, Accelgor, and scarf drapion can pick it off on low health. However, it's coverage and toolkit can generally lend itself to being able to break through answers with things like Super fang, Switcheroo and others. That being said, I think it's a solid option on the table, and by far the most likely to not be broken of all the "normal" pokemon, ie not shuckle or froslass.

TLDR: Unban Shuckle, I think it's a harmless move to consider. If no action is made, look into banning scrafty, as Floss said I think it's part of why the fat stuff is as good as it is

MrAldo · Jun 29, 2024

In the end if the post ended up being pretty targeting I will lay my bed on that one, but still points out what is the point of changing a tier like that all of a sudden with such a small data in general? Tinkering with a tier just because one mon manages to adapt and take advantages of some trends is fascinating on its own, but just because that happens you aim to look for a way to remove it, I dont believe it is a sensible approach on the matter on a tier with very low activity

One need to consider the options more carefully, this isnt like ORAS OU where people are gonna have SPL, then Classic, then potentially other side tournaments + masters. There isnt enough reason to push something like this, there is not gonna be enough movement for an ORAS RU Seasonal to gather any intel, other than top players picking up the tier for less than 10 games a season and then making an educated guess based on just... that. It doesnt really work like this.

Oh, Scrafty developed a set that can demolish the common stuff? Good! Thats metagame development, now a healthy approach into this one is to allow other potential decent choices to gain more popularity and from there try to see more options. Driving the scope into the most convenient scenario isnt good, because we are looking to remove Scrafty just because it beats the common things at the moment and anything else is being labeled "not useful enough" or whatever.

In the end this just reeks of trying to make the tier more "comfortable" by just considering whats common, you gotta adapt and try new things. If people were getting punished by Scrafty by week 2 but then managed to force Scrafty users into a losing record by the rest of the weeks then thats good, they adapted. Thats development, and honestly this tier could use every bit of development it can get, not just ban the mon to regress to the same comfort zone, it is a very skewed mentality and this will provide skewed results.

Unless you can make sure that everyone involved in any type of tests are using the desirable new builds instead of resorting to the same balances and bulky offenses, minus scrafty, then I still stand you all dont know what we are talking about here. At least have the decency of having more data instead of jumping the gun on this. I promise there are more options than just the standard.

EviGaro · Jun 29, 2024

Floss said:
The increase in the usage of the Substitute set, which is able to exploit most Venusaur sets and offer Scrafty more chances to set-up, makes it hard to feel confident in checks that are reliant on one-time use berries, such as most of the ones you listed. This is one of the reasons I feel people are generally relying on fatter Fairies that can switch in multiple times, rather than using DGleam lures which are wasting a moveslot otherwise and might still be ineffective into Scrafty. You listed a bunch of other offensive mons that don't rely on Colbur, like Hitmonlee and Aerodactyl, but most of them are also predicated on beating Scrafty in a straight-up scenario (unlikely to happen in an actual game unless the opponent's already lost) and can't switch into it easily if it is exploiting another mon.

I think you aren't giving enough consideration to why most of these balances end up oriented towards the more defensive end, especially since I feel like the reason for the shift to more of these fatter comps is due to Scrafty itself. To reliably check the Substitute set defensively, you have to usually use Granbull/Diancie/another Fairy, which can easily stomach both STABs and threaten to OHKO back. The issue with these mons is that they can easily get chipped down after Knock removes Leftovers, which leads to the obvious solution of using WishPass like Alomomola to keep your Fairy healthy. Miyami did bring up the possibility of using mons like M-Audino and Aromatisse which can encompass the cleric role and Scrafty check while maintaining recovery to themselves with Wish, but these mons are easily exploitable by other teams and usually end up as liabilities against comps without Scrafty.

At this point, your team has 2 slots used on defensively inclined mons, without having a Steel type, Ground type, speed control, hazards control... not to forget, the best mon in the tier in Venusaur. If you end up using the standard Flygon/Registeel/Venusaur core to encompass all of these roles (and relying on Scarf Defog Flygon as your removal at that point), you only have 1 slot left for a truly offensive mon, which concludes in the composition of these fat balances we are saying today. There are some other posts which are saying banning Scrafty would enable passive balances a lot more, but from my experience these passive balances are being generated by Scrafty's presence and removing it might go some way in allowing for more offensive creativity on these kind of teams. Of course, this is a bit theoretical, so something similar to the system used for Talonflame in SM RU could be useful? Suspect tours and a forum tour without the mon would give us some more insight into how the metagame looks like when Scrafty isn't there.

- Most of the balances end up fatter because they fight other balances all the time. ORAS RU became really fat because of Venusaur, not Scrafty, and frankly its pretty similar here. You seek to outlast bulky Venusaur teams if you are running balance in ORAS RU because no one wants to lose to Venu sitting on the whole squad with no chance to pp stall, so you end up not using mons that could be pursuit bait that kill Venusaur - incidentally, none of those are things Scrafty really like to switch into, like Sigilyph and Delphox - and you end up having to take into account other fighting resists that do well against the things Venusaur doesn't like - Gallade / Medicham / Hitmonlee / Scrafty - so you end up with Granbull / Aromatisse / Slowking because you don't really want to overload Mola even in non-Scrafty scenarios. Like said before, those teams also tend to fold vs BU Braviary, which was true around the same time the first complaints about Scrafty started. However, like Scrafty's case, those teams tend to adjust offensively, not defensively. You'd see investment on Regi to successfully tbolt, or more SpA Diancie, or Eviolite Magneton making appearances on balance. Point is, when those teams were confronted with a sufficiently threatening breaker like Braviary or Scrafty, you couldn't really adjust by adding more bulk. It's the same thing when SD and Growth Venusaur started popping up due to their great matchups vs balance and opposite Venu. You start running Xatu / bulky FO Sigi because those are your best bets to sufficiently handle it while not destroying the integrity of the build.

- Yeah Sub beats some Venu sets - folds against Growth / SD - but it's not really relevant to the gleam mons because of the extremely high amount of SpD you need to crank into Scrafty for that to reliably work vs your key matchup. You then end up not being able to 3hkos any of the gleam lures even if you repeatedly attack them - which means never fricking up and clicking sub on mons you tend to believe you straight up set up on - so point still applies. Similar point with NP Slowking, who sets up too quickly for Scrafty and if its already set before Scrafty comes in this mon is really not that relevant.

- Hitmonlee always does around 60 with Mach Punch, Aero around 75 with Ace. Sure they don'y switch much into it, but the point of those mons is moreso on teams that can easily handle a +1 Scrafty and deal enough damage. Fully recognize that they are awkward fit on the stall you out types, but again, kinda goes back to the point that these are not that incredible in the metagame that you need to use them all the time, or be the only archetype people try to innovate in. You see plenty of oras games where offence really handles those builds, especially in tours - heck one just happened - so at no point do more offensive builds embarrass themselves in the tier, or showcase a total lack of viabilty. It was a key frustration other mains and I had back during current gen, and one we're experiencing to this day.

fran17 · Jun 30, 2024

Floss said:
At this point, your team has 2 slots used on defensively inclined mons, without having a Steel type, Ground type, speed control, hazards control... not to forget, the best mon in the tier in Venusaur. If you end up using the standard Flygon/Registeel/Venusaur core to encompass all of these roles (and relying on Scarf Defog Flygon as your removal at that point),

yeah mate thats the main reason scrafty keeps running over you then, maybe you can try to build withouth the checklist of what you need and try to cover things with more presence in game. its a kinda of twisted way to say it so ill make an example
if im weak to hazards i can do 2 things. 1. i put defog flygon (there are other options but anyway keep playing flygon) 2. i can outplay the hazard setters with taunt users/xatu/force an hazard war from me.
if you do plan 1. you will end up in doing the simplest thing, but its probably something your opponent who plays hazard is prepared for since flygon is the most used defogger. if you do plan 2. you probably get an advantage on your opponent since you have a proactive counterplay to the hazard problems, instead of a passive one that gives the edge to your opponent.
hope its clear :) please build better teams!

Denial · Jul 1, 2024

After further consideration from what i said in the RU Discord and reading this thread, i'm still on the ban Scrafty side (which im not really gonna argue on since i believe other posters already did better than i could) but i'm not sure anymore its the move. I personally have tried to build in ORAS RU in the past and this might be a skill issue from my part but i don't think its very fun or allows for much creativity either, the tier is really centralized around a few very strong Pokemon (Venusaur being the main culprit) where it feels like you only have so many options, and i believe this is also the reason people are currently not bothering too hard with building something new. Now, would banning Scrafty achieve to make people build more? Doubtful, the Venu-esque teams will still be there and stronger now, so if anything it might allow for even less creativity. Do we just give one more year and hope people will bother building new stuff for the next team tour and/or classic? Sure we could, but again i'm not so sure how much of this said creativity can really be achieved. I guess what i'm trying to say is that i'm pretty thorn right now, i at the moment don't really see a right option and while i do usually hate doing this, we might as well... wait and give the tier some more time. RU has definetely in recent time been more active than ever, so if there's a time we could hopefully see some real changes to ORAS, next season might be the one. Goes to say that i hope most people who are currently defending the current meta show up next year to prove the point, at the end of the day we all want the best meta possible.

EviGaro said:
You see plenty of oras games where offence really handles those builds, especially in tours - heck one just happened -

Not meant as a stab to the players who played this game, but i think we need to be careful about what replays we post to prove our points. I think this game was heavily missplayed from the balance side and imo if played optimally very likely won the game.

Sorry if my post doesn't add much of value at this point, but i did promise a post. Thanks to everyone who posted so far the discussions been great! Hopefully we can reach a conclusion that can satisfy everyone.

Piyu · Jul 1, 2024

Yep I wrote it all by myself (fr this time)

Scrafty imo is a necessary evil for the tier. I am sure no one likes to see the same regi mola venu core being used for the 50th time in a row. Scrafty punishes the lazy reuses/builds . One of the very few mons which doesnt allow trollomomola to sit there,spam scalds and wish forever. That being said the utility with knock, status absorber (sorta), ease of setup and sweeping teams is probably too powerful for the otherwise weak and slow paced tier. Its a matter of whether you want to truly balance the tier but at the cost of every team having same 5 mons or promoting more creative teams.

I prefer the latter more hence will be voting no ban on scrafty (if there is a vote).

Discussion Scrafty in ORAS RU

DugZa

Carpe Diem

EviGaro

FlamPoke

fran17

@TrickingMaiale on twitter

HANTSUKI

satan saves xmas

atomicllamas

but then what's left of me?

Miyami~~~

Free Palestine

MrAldo

Hey

Floss

never forgotten

LBN

MrAldo

Hey

EviGaro

fran17

@TrickingMaiale on twitter

Denial

Piyu