I struggle to imagine the world where 4 broken Pokemon being banned is abusing quick bans, but I don't think I'd like to live in it.
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Metagame SV OU Metagame Discussion
- Thread starter TPP
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Literally 1 offensive mon has been banned per 2 days this game has been out thus far.
That's a lot of words and incorrect math to say "only four Pokemon have been banned"
Want to give your reasoning why any of the pokemon other than palafin deserved to stay, given you seem to think it was the most broken, and these other bans are unreasonable, even though it had the most counterplay of the pokemon banned so far this gen. It just crushed unprepared teams, and it's disproportionate impact in the teambuilder is why it was banned. Conversely, the bird's only actual safe switch in was Blissey, and even that could die to a poorly timed freeze, and was fodder for taunt or encore variants.
Edit because of your other reply: Wow turns out in a new generation, the offensive threats are what are immediately apparently broken, because they come in and immediate start killing you, but stall takes a while to work out what's good, and is entirely dependent on what else is currently around, so it doesn't make sense to ban things from it until the meta is stable. If goldengho hazzard stack becomes a problem (and it definitely might), I don't even think it'll be hard stall that makes the best use of it. Gholdengho struggles to switch into the premier spinners this generation, and generally just extends the duration of hazards against prepared teams, rather than stopping spinning entirely.
Clearly you haven't been keeping it up. Sure, 2 have been banned per week the game has been out, but those 4 pokemon were broken, and the council has stated they're slowing down from this point forward. We will collectively make a decision about terastilizing and from there, we will do suspect tests unless something becomes super problematic. The next time a pokemon will be banned will be, in my best guess, about a month away unless something shows up as super broken.
Really late to the new gen party, but I've been abusing resist berries with Terastalisation to double down on picking up surprise KOs with several mons, especially Roaring Moon. Booster Energy on DD sets is common enough that many players just assume you are choiced if they don't see the Photosynthesis boost, so you can play it as if it is. Once sufficient chip on defensive checks has been accumulated, you reveal the ability to switch moves, DD up on their defensive check and commit Tera Dark/Steel to take it out if necessary. When they switch in their Fighting type answer like Breloom, you survive the Mach Punch with Chople Berry, and proceed to win because you successfully baited both their offensive and defensive check.
If something is clearly broken, there's really just no reason to keep it around just because the meta can "adapt around it".
If you bring Kyogre into OU, the meta can and will adapt around it to make it possible to deal with.
But that doesn't mean it's a healthy meta in any way.
Edit:
Serious question, when are we allowing Kyogre in NU? It is hopelessly walled by the meta staple that is Yache Berry Parasect
If you bring Kyogre into OU, the meta can and will adapt around it to make it possible to deal with.
But that doesn't mean it's a healthy meta in any way.
Edit:
Serious question, when are we allowing Kyogre in NU? It is hopelessly walled by the meta staple that is Yache Berry Parasect
Last edited:
Stall doesn't "take a while to figure out what's good" lmfao it is ALWAYS legislated into existence via bans. OU is not happy until all the queens are banned from the chessboard. Then once the brain geniuses can convince themselves playing 200 turns with a duo regen core is Strategy At Its Purest and only then are we allowed to have "fun". Same song and dance. Don't say I didn't warn ya
So you're leaving to go play with them in Ubers? I hope you have fun there. We'll have fun here. Best of luck! May your hits be critical and may your opponent miss their Focus Blasts.
bro plays digimon showdown
We banned Palafin. Palafin's checks where all bulky Pokemon like Amoonguss, which largely fit on stall (and balance).
We banned Iron Bundle. Iron Bundle's primary checks where Pokemon like Blissey, which only fits on stall.
If anything, we are legislating the metagame to be more offensive and proactive as we ban things that do not have sufficient offensive counterplay, which is a symptom of being broken/banworthy. Perhaps the system is working just fine and you are mad for the sake of being mad.
I actually can't see Rain being particularly good rn, Barraskewda lost Flip Turn, and Rain's best breakers are now dead. Without having a good special Water breaker, Dondozo + bulky Grounds can just stop most iterations of Rain I see in it's tracks.
4 Quickbans seem pretty standard fare.
Stall existing is important for the game. And yeah stall mirrors kinda suck to watch and play but they're incredibly skill testing. Not to mention that I was using Iron Bundle on stall and effortlessly crushed offense with it, because Iron Bundle completely tore apart every offensive team, and everything offensive that could threaten it was useless vs stall.
Some ramblings on Terastallize, where the hat you wears matters.
I think a lot of the discourse on Tera has been focused on the wrong things so far — debates on its power level or whether it lets mons blow past conventional checks or whether it contributes to making stuff like Roaring Moon busted or what-have-you. All of these are important things to discuss, for sure, and it's possible Tera is overbearing on one or more of these points, but I think they're all missing the forest for the trees. All of these things are tangible manifestations of the subtler real problem.
To me, the fundamental concern with Terastallize is its effects on identifying and progressing towards win conditions.
Anyone who's played mons at a passable level, or at least follows players who do (e.g. keeps up with tournament replays or whatever), knows that winning at Pokemon is rarely about making better turn-by-turn predictions or getting the upper hand in individual exchanges [1]. Rather, it's about being able to identify win conditions and how to make progress towards them. This is a big concept to get the hang of since it's core to analyzing gamestates, which is the main mechanism by which skill differences manifest at a high level [2]. When Heavy-Duty Boots were first released, a lot of players identified that they'd make Rocks-vulnerable mons like Volcarona and passive walls like Blissey a lot stronger. This is true, but their effect on the gamestate — one of essentially halting an entire mechanism of making progress (hazards) — ended up being a lot more influential on the metagame overall [3]. This took a bit longer to identify since it was a bit subtler, but when people started arguing to ban Boots (something which had very serious support for a while despite not going through), it was not because it made Cinderace broken or pushed WishPort over the line. Hell, Boots isn't the only thing that this argument has been applied to. Everything from Aegislash to Ditto has had people arguing for a ban on these grounds: "it's not broken but it warps and reduces the skill requirement of every game it participates in" [4].
Of course, Boots didn't end up banned, and I think a major reason for that is that its effects on progress became accounted for. Hazardstack fell out of favour, with most teams that used Spikes also running a gratuitious amount of Knock Off. Sticky Web went from "fringe archetype that could be okay in another meta" to something that wasn't even good enough to be a meme [5]. And just in general, we saw a lot more teams focus on other ways to make progress as the generation progressed. Knock Off has lost distribution this generation so it's unclear whether this one will follow a similar trajectory, but in any case, I think players were able to "adapt" to how Boots affected their mechanism of making progress [6].
But Terastallize is not Boots. Boots had a clear and consistent effect on how games are played and won. They reduced the amount pivoting could be punished, and meant that hazard stack wasn't unambiguously a way to make progress towards a "clean" unless supported by Knock Off or other ways to punish bulky pivot cores [7]. Tera does not come with this luxury.
Tera has negative effects on the gamestate, but these negative effects are fundamentally unpredictable [8]. You have no clue if your opponent will be able to Tera into a type that stops your sweep. You have no clue if your opponent's sweeper will pull out a surprise Tera Fairy that makes it impossible for you to revenge, or a Tera Electric that blows past the mon you thought would "counter" it. Indeed, I would argue that we cannot analyze Generation 9 in the same way we analyzed previous generations for as long as Tera exists, since it is currently impossible to consistently recognize win conditions no matter how good your metagame knowledge is.
Let me take an example [9]. You identify that your opponent has a Dragapult on their team, and you recognize that DD Dragapult is potentially problematic to your team structure. A half-decent player would now know to prioritize keeping their checks healthy — mons that can switch in and prevent it from setting up, or mons that can Sucker it to revenge it, or whatever. Similarly, your opponent knows that their job is to WEAKEN those checks. This establishes the fundamental framework the game is played around: your opponent wants to set up their win condition and you want to stop them [10]. But with Terastallize, this sort of analysis is impossible. I am not exaggerating; this one mechanic single-handedly makes this sort of long-term planning not something that can be done (at least, not with what I currently understand about the game — but from talking to strong players, I get the sense that they share my frustration here, even if they don't formalize it in these terms). Here are some examples of ways Terastallize complicates the above win condition analysis:
The observant among you might argue that all of these boxes are ticked by something already. Sure, it's unclear whether you can revenge Pult with Sucker Punch, but that's always been the case — DD Pult has always been able to run Substitute! Sure, it's unclear what walls what, but plenty of mons get weird coverage options or niche sets or whatever — not to mention Z-moves weren't banned when those existed, and they were arguably more problematic in terms of what can be lured and what can be broken[12][13]. And besides, isn't part of the skill of Pokemon adapting to complications in the gameplan anyway? Aren't the most exciting games the ones where a player has a "key" wall lured out and disposed of early, but goes on to find some miracle comeback?
The problem is that Tera does this all at once with effectively no opportunity cost [14]. Skilled players can account for individual complications and disruptions, and in fact, the existence of such disruptions is a great opportunity for creativity and skill expression [15][16]. But Tera makes every Pokemon a potential source of win condition disruption from multiple angles. I do not know any of the types of my opponent's Pokemon until they click Tera. I do not know what they wall, what they kill, even what status I can use against them. I do not know whether I can Spin on them. I don't know anything, I can't plan around anything.
It's like every OU game is a game of OU Blitz where you just try to make the best decisions on a turn-to-turn basis because there's no real room to plan out long-term — except Blitz's time constraints are something a skilled player can overcome by getting good at thinking fast and focusing on what's important. So my question, then, is:
How do we construct a long-term gameplan focused around making progress towards win conditions in the "Era of Tera"?
I'm still not 100% certain I want action taken on Tera, since I think it's possible that this question has an answer... or even perhaps that I'm asking the wrong question. Perhaps thinking of generation 9 as a traditional generation, with traditional development towards traditional win conditions, is a mistake. We've already basically thrown out the idea of "countering" Pokemon this gen because nothing "counters" anything with full consistency — instead, it's all about hedging the most likely Pokemon to wall you, to stop you, to sweep you [17].
I use the jargon "Era of Tera" because I want a term for this hypothetical new framework of analyzing games of Pokemon. We can't think about counters, and we can't really think about consistent win conditions [18]. So perhaps I'm just thinking about games wrong. Perhaps there's some post-Tera way of analyzing gamestates [19] that requires us to toss out a lot of "traditional knowledge" [20]. This is a solid argument for being hesitant on Tera, for waiting for players to figure it out. Maybe we should give it more time, healthy development of the metagame (and the ability to make sensible bans) be damned.
But SPL is coming up soonish and I have genuine concerns that Tera continuing to warp the tier will negatively disrupt metagame development — for now it's "too soon to ban Tera", in 6 months it'll be "Tera is too entrenched in the metagame for us to ban it", so what's the point at which we can conclude that, in lieu of finding another way to "play" Pokemon in this "Era of Tera", that Terastallize just removes a lot of opportunities for competitive skill expression from the metagame?
I don't know.
But at the moment, I think Tera is unhealthy. It deemphasizes long-term planning, it reduces the skill cap of the tier, and it makes games too focused around getting key predicts on key turns [21]. I'm not optimistic towards our chances of finding a solution to this that holds this tier up to a similar standard of competition than it would be without Terastallize.
Apologies for how long and disjointed this is, I hope I got the point across. This mechanic is a problem, but maybe it's one that'll fix itself like Boots kind of did [22]. It has a lot going against it, though.
——————
Footnotes
[1]: which is why the concept of "momentum" is so nebulous and has kind of fallen out of favour as a way to analyze games since the era of U-Turn-spamming Scizors in pre-Fairygens
[2]: Indeed, a lot of "ladder players" who aren't good enough to make it into Smogon tournies — myself included — struggle because of precisely this point. They have very good gamesense and metagame understanding and are often very skilled at predictions and at threat identification, but struggle to put all the pieces together into a conclusive gameplan. They have, by and large, gotten the hang of making "safe/hedge/midground" plays, but not quite at the overall gamestate. This is what distinguishes them from truly "good" players, to me (and yes, by this definition, I am not a "good" player).
[3]: Or in the case of Regenerator abusers like Toxapex and (to a lesser extent) Torn-T, they bolstered an existing form of reversing progress, i.e. healing off damage taken.
[4]: To be clear, the people who argued against Ditto in this way were a very, very small minority, but they did exist briefly near the end of gen 7 — and they were, by and large, "high-level" players. It wasn't the ladder heroes arguing for this, it was a small subset of SPL players who regularly posted in Policy Review and who understood the game on a high level.
[5]: Sticky Web has been playable in Ubers in the past.
[6]: Trust me, I despise "just adapt" as well as anyone, but there are cases where it legitimately applies — especially when we're talking about a characteristic of an entire metagame (whether it be an item or a move or a mechanic) rather than an individual threat or two.
[7]: I would even argue that "cleaners" as we traditionally understand them were basically killed by Boots. I mean, sure, mons like Kartana demonstrate similar traits and patterns, but how many generation 8 games are actually won by a Scarf Pokemon spamming resisted moves against weakened threats, a la the "cleaners" of old like ScarfChomp or ScarfKeld? A lot more gen 8 games ended with scrappy endgames involving Tornadus or whatever. LO 3/4 Attack Pokemon were almost extinct by the end of the generation, and priority cleaners were practically nonexistent.
[8]: For the purpose of this post, I will not be discussing proposals like "force Pokemon to reveal their Tera types at team preview". Maybe this would work, but it unsettles me from a policy perspective — and in any case, before discussing "solutions" like that, I'd at least want us to come to a general agreement of whether Tera is a problem or not.
[9]: I stress that DD Dragapult is just an example, and any win condition could fill in this place. In fact, part of the skill difference between "good" and "great" players is being able to identify less "obvious" win conditions, like "my defensive core can't be broken except by x threat, so my win condition is to cripple x threat — but y pivot lets it come in for free, so my opponent's win condition will be to get in y pivot a lot in order to get x threat in a lot and get a free kill every time". You don't need a mon explicitly marked "wincon" to have a win condition. But Terastallize is a problem for every form of win condition, not just sweepers.
[10]: Of course, this is symmetrical — you probably have a win condition of your own you want to set up — but for the sake of this example, I'll take a one-sided view.
[11]: To be clear, Aegislash's 50/50s were not the problem. They are not why Aegislash was banned. Hopefully the fact that it was unbanned and healthy in generation 8 should demonstrate this, but I still see so much historical revisionism on this point that it's kind of ridiculous.
[12]: ...though there's an argument that Z-moves should have been banned, that isn't super relevant either way here.
[13]: Unlike Z-moves, though, Tera has Tera Blast, so it doesn't require a matching-type move to lure things and blow past them anyway. Not to mention that Z-moves were one-time activation and otherwise were a waste of a move and item slot, whereas a successful Tera continues to pay dividends throughout the entire game. This direct comparison is potentially misleading, though, so I suggest you not read too much into it.
[14]: I barely count Tera Blast as an opportunity cost here, since if you spend your Tera on it, it just becomes a good STAB. But yes, if you don't Tera, then Tera Blast is an opportunity cost of sorts.
[15]: There's a reason a lot of the most memorable tournament moments are things like an unexpected Z move lure or some crazy Scarf Final Gambit play (if you know the game I'm talking about, you know).
[16]: ...and for what it's worth, I think generation 9 is a very... uncreative? metagame, even in light of Tera gimmicks. Perhaps that's the wrong word — this is a very nebulous concept, after all — but a lot of the new designs feel obviously minmaxed towards a single goal. Esparath is literally CM + Speed Boost + STAB Stored Power, a lot of the Paradox mons are minmaxed offensive stats + near-unresisted STABs, you get the idea. The sets kind of build themselves. It's frustrating — I don't expect to see too many cheeky innovations like Vincune or SubPunch TTar emerging when so many of these Pokemon sets basically build themselves. This is a side point, though, and one I don't think council tiering action can realistically fix.
[17]: and I'm not opposed to this hedging on principle. In fact, competitive Pokemon is arguably a game about balancing probabilities and hedging the odds. It's always possible to lose due to a badly-timed miss or freeze, after all — predicting what checks what in the Era of Tera, while not explicitly RNG, is arguably its own sort of "hedging" and "randomness". Adding this layer of unpredictability isn't a priori unhealthy.
[18]: Again, win conditions have never been 100% consistent — it's Pokemon, after all, and that ambiguity is arguably a good thing for the game's skill cap — but Tera, at least from what I've seen, brings down the consistency to unprecedentedly low levels to the point where planning around a "win condition" goes wrong more often than it goes right.
[19]: I would be moderately concerned if we had to totally reevaluate how competitive Pokemon works every single generation with each new passing gimmick, but oh well.
[20]: and yes, I recognize I'm being hyperbolic here.
[21]: the fact that you can only Tera once is, in my opinion, a flaw rather than a feature — it means that "predicting correctly" with Tera is way more important than it has any right to be. Again, I hate banning things based off of "forcing prediction" since I think a lot of less experienced players conflate their own inabilities to analyze gamestates and pick good mid-grounds with "losing 50/50s", but if any mechanic forces a ridiculously high burden on prediction, it's Tera. (Perhaps we will see Protect popularized as a way to exploit this, though — who knows.)
[22]: Hell, maybe it's a mechanic that adds skill to the game — hazards are arguably "broken" in an overcentralizing sense, but I don't think anyone would argue that they're unhealthy for the game (though perhaps they're a bit too good in some metagames). They add a relevant dynamic to the game and complicate a lot of gamestates in an interesting and competitive way.
I think a lot of the discourse on Tera has been focused on the wrong things so far — debates on its power level or whether it lets mons blow past conventional checks or whether it contributes to making stuff like Roaring Moon busted or what-have-you. All of these are important things to discuss, for sure, and it's possible Tera is overbearing on one or more of these points, but I think they're all missing the forest for the trees. All of these things are tangible manifestations of the subtler real problem.
To me, the fundamental concern with Terastallize is its effects on identifying and progressing towards win conditions.
Anyone who's played mons at a passable level, or at least follows players who do (e.g. keeps up with tournament replays or whatever), knows that winning at Pokemon is rarely about making better turn-by-turn predictions or getting the upper hand in individual exchanges [1]. Rather, it's about being able to identify win conditions and how to make progress towards them. This is a big concept to get the hang of since it's core to analyzing gamestates, which is the main mechanism by which skill differences manifest at a high level [2]. When Heavy-Duty Boots were first released, a lot of players identified that they'd make Rocks-vulnerable mons like Volcarona and passive walls like Blissey a lot stronger. This is true, but their effect on the gamestate — one of essentially halting an entire mechanism of making progress (hazards) — ended up being a lot more influential on the metagame overall [3]. This took a bit longer to identify since it was a bit subtler, but when people started arguing to ban Boots (something which had very serious support for a while despite not going through), it was not because it made Cinderace broken or pushed WishPort over the line. Hell, Boots isn't the only thing that this argument has been applied to. Everything from Aegislash to Ditto has had people arguing for a ban on these grounds: "it's not broken but it warps and reduces the skill requirement of every game it participates in" [4].
Of course, Boots didn't end up banned, and I think a major reason for that is that its effects on progress became accounted for. Hazardstack fell out of favour, with most teams that used Spikes also running a gratuitious amount of Knock Off. Sticky Web went from "fringe archetype that could be okay in another meta" to something that wasn't even good enough to be a meme [5]. And just in general, we saw a lot more teams focus on other ways to make progress as the generation progressed. Knock Off has lost distribution this generation so it's unclear whether this one will follow a similar trajectory, but in any case, I think players were able to "adapt" to how Boots affected their mechanism of making progress [6].
But Terastallize is not Boots. Boots had a clear and consistent effect on how games are played and won. They reduced the amount pivoting could be punished, and meant that hazard stack wasn't unambiguously a way to make progress towards a "clean" unless supported by Knock Off or other ways to punish bulky pivot cores [7]. Tera does not come with this luxury.
Tera has negative effects on the gamestate, but these negative effects are fundamentally unpredictable [8]. You have no clue if your opponent will be able to Tera into a type that stops your sweep. You have no clue if your opponent's sweeper will pull out a surprise Tera Fairy that makes it impossible for you to revenge, or a Tera Electric that blows past the mon you thought would "counter" it. Indeed, I would argue that we cannot analyze Generation 9 in the same way we analyzed previous generations for as long as Tera exists, since it is currently impossible to consistently recognize win conditions no matter how good your metagame knowledge is.
Let me take an example [9]. You identify that your opponent has a Dragapult on their team, and you recognize that DD Dragapult is potentially problematic to your team structure. A half-decent player would now know to prioritize keeping their checks healthy — mons that can switch in and prevent it from setting up, or mons that can Sucker it to revenge it, or whatever. Similarly, your opponent knows that their job is to WEAKEN those checks. This establishes the fundamental framework the game is played around: your opponent wants to set up their win condition and you want to stop them [10]. But with Terastallize, this sort of analysis is impossible. I am not exaggerating; this one mechanic single-handedly makes this sort of long-term planning not something that can be done (at least, not with what I currently understand about the game — but from talking to strong players, I get the sense that they share my frustration here, even if they don't formalize it in these terms). Here are some examples of ways Terastallize complicates the above win condition analysis:
- Dragapult's Tera type is unknown, so it's very unclear what actually walls it. Sure, most Dragapults are Tera Ghost right now, but there's nothing really forcing that.
- Dragapult's Tera type is unknown, so it's very unclear what actually revenges it.
- Dragapult's teammates also have unknown Tera types, so they could lure in the counterplay to Dragapult you spent so long trying to keep safe and healthy and disposing of it.
- The Pokemon Dragapult should be able to "sweep" have unknown Tera types, so you could see a random Tera Dark or Tera Normal or Tera Fairy totally halt Dragapult's sweep, or at least force some uncomfortable 50/50s. This point is particularly problematic to me, since it means that — even if the win condition is correctly analyzed and flawlessly set up — its success could potentially come down to whether you predict the Tera type correctly and choose the correct move/switch/whether to Tera or not/etc. Even as we get more "used to" Tera and get a sense for what Tera types are common on what mons, this will be a perpetual problem to a far greater extent than Aegislash's 50/50s ever were [11].
The observant among you might argue that all of these boxes are ticked by something already. Sure, it's unclear whether you can revenge Pult with Sucker Punch, but that's always been the case — DD Pult has always been able to run Substitute! Sure, it's unclear what walls what, but plenty of mons get weird coverage options or niche sets or whatever — not to mention Z-moves weren't banned when those existed, and they were arguably more problematic in terms of what can be lured and what can be broken[12][13]. And besides, isn't part of the skill of Pokemon adapting to complications in the gameplan anyway? Aren't the most exciting games the ones where a player has a "key" wall lured out and disposed of early, but goes on to find some miracle comeback?
The problem is that Tera does this all at once with effectively no opportunity cost [14]. Skilled players can account for individual complications and disruptions, and in fact, the existence of such disruptions is a great opportunity for creativity and skill expression [15][16]. But Tera makes every Pokemon a potential source of win condition disruption from multiple angles. I do not know any of the types of my opponent's Pokemon until they click Tera. I do not know what they wall, what they kill, even what status I can use against them. I do not know whether I can Spin on them. I don't know anything, I can't plan around anything.
It's like every OU game is a game of OU Blitz where you just try to make the best decisions on a turn-to-turn basis because there's no real room to plan out long-term — except Blitz's time constraints are something a skilled player can overcome by getting good at thinking fast and focusing on what's important. So my question, then, is:
How do we construct a long-term gameplan focused around making progress towards win conditions in the "Era of Tera"?
I'm still not 100% certain I want action taken on Tera, since I think it's possible that this question has an answer... or even perhaps that I'm asking the wrong question. Perhaps thinking of generation 9 as a traditional generation, with traditional development towards traditional win conditions, is a mistake. We've already basically thrown out the idea of "countering" Pokemon this gen because nothing "counters" anything with full consistency — instead, it's all about hedging the most likely Pokemon to wall you, to stop you, to sweep you [17].
I use the jargon "Era of Tera" because I want a term for this hypothetical new framework of analyzing games of Pokemon. We can't think about counters, and we can't really think about consistent win conditions [18]. So perhaps I'm just thinking about games wrong. Perhaps there's some post-Tera way of analyzing gamestates [19] that requires us to toss out a lot of "traditional knowledge" [20]. This is a solid argument for being hesitant on Tera, for waiting for players to figure it out. Maybe we should give it more time, healthy development of the metagame (and the ability to make sensible bans) be damned.
But SPL is coming up soonish and I have genuine concerns that Tera continuing to warp the tier will negatively disrupt metagame development — for now it's "too soon to ban Tera", in 6 months it'll be "Tera is too entrenched in the metagame for us to ban it", so what's the point at which we can conclude that, in lieu of finding another way to "play" Pokemon in this "Era of Tera", that Terastallize just removes a lot of opportunities for competitive skill expression from the metagame?
I don't know.
But at the moment, I think Tera is unhealthy. It deemphasizes long-term planning, it reduces the skill cap of the tier, and it makes games too focused around getting key predicts on key turns [21]. I'm not optimistic towards our chances of finding a solution to this that holds this tier up to a similar standard of competition than it would be without Terastallize.
Apologies for how long and disjointed this is, I hope I got the point across. This mechanic is a problem, but maybe it's one that'll fix itself like Boots kind of did [22]. It has a lot going against it, though.
——————
Footnotes
[1]: which is why the concept of "momentum" is so nebulous and has kind of fallen out of favour as a way to analyze games since the era of U-Turn-spamming Scizors in pre-Fairygens
[2]: Indeed, a lot of "ladder players" who aren't good enough to make it into Smogon tournies — myself included — struggle because of precisely this point. They have very good gamesense and metagame understanding and are often very skilled at predictions and at threat identification, but struggle to put all the pieces together into a conclusive gameplan. They have, by and large, gotten the hang of making "safe/hedge/midground" plays, but not quite at the overall gamestate. This is what distinguishes them from truly "good" players, to me (and yes, by this definition, I am not a "good" player).
[3]: Or in the case of Regenerator abusers like Toxapex and (to a lesser extent) Torn-T, they bolstered an existing form of reversing progress, i.e. healing off damage taken.
[4]: To be clear, the people who argued against Ditto in this way were a very, very small minority, but they did exist briefly near the end of gen 7 — and they were, by and large, "high-level" players. It wasn't the ladder heroes arguing for this, it was a small subset of SPL players who regularly posted in Policy Review and who understood the game on a high level.
[5]: Sticky Web has been playable in Ubers in the past.
[6]: Trust me, I despise "just adapt" as well as anyone, but there are cases where it legitimately applies — especially when we're talking about a characteristic of an entire metagame (whether it be an item or a move or a mechanic) rather than an individual threat or two.
[7]: I would even argue that "cleaners" as we traditionally understand them were basically killed by Boots. I mean, sure, mons like Kartana demonstrate similar traits and patterns, but how many generation 8 games are actually won by a Scarf Pokemon spamming resisted moves against weakened threats, a la the "cleaners" of old like ScarfChomp or ScarfKeld? A lot more gen 8 games ended with scrappy endgames involving Tornadus or whatever. LO 3/4 Attack Pokemon were almost extinct by the end of the generation, and priority cleaners were practically nonexistent.
[8]: For the purpose of this post, I will not be discussing proposals like "force Pokemon to reveal their Tera types at team preview". Maybe this would work, but it unsettles me from a policy perspective — and in any case, before discussing "solutions" like that, I'd at least want us to come to a general agreement of whether Tera is a problem or not.
[9]: I stress that DD Dragapult is just an example, and any win condition could fill in this place. In fact, part of the skill difference between "good" and "great" players is being able to identify less "obvious" win conditions, like "my defensive core can't be broken except by x threat, so my win condition is to cripple x threat — but y pivot lets it come in for free, so my opponent's win condition will be to get in y pivot a lot in order to get x threat in a lot and get a free kill every time". You don't need a mon explicitly marked "wincon" to have a win condition. But Terastallize is a problem for every form of win condition, not just sweepers.
[10]: Of course, this is symmetrical — you probably have a win condition of your own you want to set up — but for the sake of this example, I'll take a one-sided view.
[11]: To be clear, Aegislash's 50/50s were not the problem. They are not why Aegislash was banned. Hopefully the fact that it was unbanned and healthy in generation 8 should demonstrate this, but I still see so much historical revisionism on this point that it's kind of ridiculous.
[12]: ...though there's an argument that Z-moves should have been banned, that isn't super relevant either way here.
[13]: Unlike Z-moves, though, Tera has Tera Blast, so it doesn't require a matching-type move to lure things and blow past them anyway. Not to mention that Z-moves were one-time activation and otherwise were a waste of a move and item slot, whereas a successful Tera continues to pay dividends throughout the entire game. This direct comparison is potentially misleading, though, so I suggest you not read too much into it.
[14]: I barely count Tera Blast as an opportunity cost here, since if you spend your Tera on it, it just becomes a good STAB. But yes, if you don't Tera, then Tera Blast is an opportunity cost of sorts.
[15]: There's a reason a lot of the most memorable tournament moments are things like an unexpected Z move lure or some crazy Scarf Final Gambit play (if you know the game I'm talking about, you know).
[16]: ...and for what it's worth, I think generation 9 is a very... uncreative? metagame, even in light of Tera gimmicks. Perhaps that's the wrong word — this is a very nebulous concept, after all — but a lot of the new designs feel obviously minmaxed towards a single goal. Esparath is literally CM + Speed Boost + STAB Stored Power, a lot of the Paradox mons are minmaxed offensive stats + near-unresisted STABs, you get the idea. The sets kind of build themselves. It's frustrating — I don't expect to see too many cheeky innovations like Vincune or SubPunch TTar emerging when so many of these Pokemon sets basically build themselves. This is a side point, though, and one I don't think council tiering action can realistically fix.
[17]: and I'm not opposed to this hedging on principle. In fact, competitive Pokemon is arguably a game about balancing probabilities and hedging the odds. It's always possible to lose due to a badly-timed miss or freeze, after all — predicting what checks what in the Era of Tera, while not explicitly RNG, is arguably its own sort of "hedging" and "randomness". Adding this layer of unpredictability isn't a priori unhealthy.
[18]: Again, win conditions have never been 100% consistent — it's Pokemon, after all, and that ambiguity is arguably a good thing for the game's skill cap — but Tera, at least from what I've seen, brings down the consistency to unprecedentedly low levels to the point where planning around a "win condition" goes wrong more often than it goes right.
[19]: I would be moderately concerned if we had to totally reevaluate how competitive Pokemon works every single generation with each new passing gimmick, but oh well.
[20]: and yes, I recognize I'm being hyperbolic here.
[21]: the fact that you can only Tera once is, in my opinion, a flaw rather than a feature — it means that "predicting correctly" with Tera is way more important than it has any right to be. Again, I hate banning things based off of "forcing prediction" since I think a lot of less experienced players conflate their own inabilities to analyze gamestates and pick good mid-grounds with "losing 50/50s", but if any mechanic forces a ridiculously high burden on prediction, it's Tera. (Perhaps we will see Protect popularized as a way to exploit this, though — who knows.)
[22]: Hell, maybe it's a mechanic that adds skill to the game — hazards are arguably "broken" in an overcentralizing sense, but I don't think anyone would argue that they're unhealthy for the game (though perhaps they're a bit too good in some metagames). They add a relevant dynamic to the game and complicate a lot of gamestates in an interesting and competitive way.
alephgalactus
Banned deucer.
Ah yes, this is what a “clear lack of unanimity” looks like. You are very intelligent and we should all listen to you instead of the people who said this:
That fire/dark Pokémon is really OP as well..
anyone else noticing dark pulse is flinching more than ever before?
here’s 5 flinches in a row that caused my meme team to lose :(
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen9ou-1721688998
Seriously the power creep this gen is making it very difficult to make creative teams. I liked the SS OU after the final DLC, as you could make legitimate all-UU teams that were 100% viable in OU and could get to 2000 ELO.
feels impossible to be creative in this meta, because all the top threats are so suffocating you only deal with them by running lots of offence as well, or overpreparing your defensive Pokémon.
understandably it’s still early days.. and all power creeper generations start like this. Tho I’m surprised nevertheless just how hard GF went this time
anyone else noticing dark pulse is flinching more than ever before?
here’s 5 flinches in a row that caused my meme team to lose :(
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/gen9ou-1721688998
Seriously the power creep this gen is making it very difficult to make creative teams. I liked the SS OU after the final DLC, as you could make legitimate all-UU teams that were 100% viable in OU and could get to 2000 ELO.
feels impossible to be creative in this meta, because all the top threats are so suffocating you only deal with them by running lots of offence as well, or overpreparing your defensive Pokémon.
understandably it’s still early days.. and all power creeper generations start like this. Tho I’m surprised nevertheless just how hard GF went this time
Disclaimer: am not great at battling.
I have been having fun with rain, but my battling being inconsistent, and self imposing certain rules on myself about pokemon choices, my team isn't great. I do probably just need a better rain, but I found that Barraskewda with good defensive support worked great. I was able to U-turn with Pelipper into Barrasweda quite a bit, and was my primary answer to IB. CC on the skewer is really good. As a result, I never had problems with IB, but this is also low ladder and I have quite a bit to improve.
I am finding that rain in doubles is quite good. I had a bit of trouble making a doubles team initially, so I said screw it and put 3 swift swimmers on a team with the pelican, added raichu for electric support, tossed on a filler 6th, and I've won probably 80% of my matches since. So much fun. Still low ladder, so that could be a factor.
This is true, Palafin was a good example of that. You could try to play around it but you were probably going to sack a Pokémon. The only thing you needed to do activate this uber was just have 1 turn to switch it out and back in (Which isn't difficult).
This is so good for the metagame, still work needs to be done, but this is a great Black Friday gift for the community.
I mean this genuinely:
What is wrong with lowering the skill cap? Doesn't that just give more players the chance to reach the top? I'm having fun and the meta game is at a place where I am motivated (for now) to get better and try and get a PB Elo. If the skill cap lowers, doesn't that give me a better chance? Wouldn't that make it fun for more players and help Smogon grow?
I'm still new to interacting with the community (obviously in my profile) so if this is a bad take from me, then hey, ignore me. I am having fun with tera, and I want Smogon to succeed. I want them to meet in the middle.
Smogon is, at least ostensibly, trying to create a competitive metagame for high-level play. There is a genuine game design argument to be made for approachability, but it isn't meant to be the main priority of Smogon's tiering philosophy at the expense of competitive play.
To exaggerate to extremes, we could decide every game by a 50/50 die roll, and then any player would have a chance of becoming a top player — this would be maximally inclusive but obviously isn't desirable.
For a more realistic example, compare the design philosophies of the card games Magic: The Gathering vs Hearthstone. Both are card games and so there's an inherent amount of randomness and a very finite limit on how good you can get (there's only so many decisions you can make on a given turn, after all, since cards and mana by design act as a limiter to how much stuff you can do), but the latter game has a lot more randomness and variance built into its mechanics. This makes it more approachable for "casual" players since they can get wins easily, but Smogon's philosophy is (at least meant to be) more Magic-like than Hearthstone-like.
Ultimately, you can play with whatever ruleset you want through Showdown challenges. The only thing Smogon adds is an explicitly competitive infrastructure — the OU ladder and the tournament scene. So, since the only thing setting Smogon apart from random PS challenges is the competitive structure it creates, it makes sense for Smogon to focus on fostering a maximally competitive metagame, at least within reasonable limits (and we can argue about where those lines should be drawn, of course).
You're thinking of the skill floor. A lower skill floor isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it means that it's easier to have fun if you're bad at something. A lower skill ceiling means that the upper levels of a meta are less skill testing, because there's less to master.
That said, I completely disagree that Terra lowers the skill ceiling - quite the opposite. There's so many creative and powerful ways to use the mechanic that it feels like one of the first things in pokemon that is a true non-RNG X-factor. Now, whether or not that is healthy, or whether or not the mechanic is balanced is something else altogether. I'm of two minds - it feels like it is either about to become completely unbearable, or strong but fine, with all the clearly broken shit gone. A meta with Terra could either be extremely fun and creative, completely broken and uncompetitive, maybe both, but in any case, we are about to find out, and I'm looking forward to the huge amount of discussion that is about to start.
I wish to Nominate further Quick Bans to the Council.
I think 2 Pokémon are not enough.
Frankly, I think the Council is being to passive in Banning these Broken Pokémon, Moves, or Mechanics.
I think the Council needs to be more aggressive in their Ban’s.
1st - I want to Nominate a Quick Ban for Dragonpult.
The Below Screenshot is taking directly Gen 8 PokémonDex.
Several Pokemon who are “Dragonpult” Checks & Counters are not out in the game.
In addition, The Person who wrote the Checks & Counters named several Pokémon then said those checks are not really checks if Dragonpult is running other move set variation? WTF
I want to know who Hard switches into Dragonpult? Blissey?
Is it Iron Bundle all over again?
It is my understanding that the Councils Goal with Quick Bans is to take the blatant strong Pokémon out of OU which restricts Team Building.
I want to know how many Pokémon actually Hard Counter Dragonpult
Generation 8 - Dragonpult might have been ok because they had several Pokémon options which could collectively deal with him.
Generation 9 - We lack a lot of Pokémon and I haven’t seen anyone talk about any New Pokémon which Counter Dragonpult.
Has the day come when Dragonpult has simply because to strong for OU?
I think Dragonpult is very Oppressive.
I feel Dragonpult should be Quick Ban.
Look at all the things Dragonpult has going for it:
- Fastest Speed in the OU Tier
- Strong Offensive Moves
- Strong Typings
- A Lack of Defensive Checks due to the fact most of his Checks & Counters are not out, yet
2nd - I want to Nominate a Quick Ban for the Ability Good as Gold (Which is Gholdengo ability)
The Council did a vote on Gholdengo and found him not Ban Worthy.
I completely agree with the Council Gholdengo isn’t Ban Worthy!
What I think is Ban Worthy is Gholdengo Ability Good as Gold.
See what I did there guys? I found the Technicality.
I want to bring evidence of Good as Gold Ability being OverPowered!.
I want to clear up a misconception people have been saying which could have influenced the Council’s Decision.
Players in the forum keep saying the amount of Hazard Removal Pokémon are limited.
This is a fat out lie!
The below screenshot shows 14 different Defogger in the game.
We can clearly see there isn’t a lack of Defogging Hazard Removal.
The issue is the Ability Good as Gold is completely shutting down Defog.
1 ability outright shutting down 14 Pokémon.
Is that not oppressive and overpowered?
Gholdengo is an average Pokémon at best.
Gholdengo isn’t Ban worthy.
The Ability Good as Gold is a Godlike ability.
The Ability Good as Gold is Ban worthy.
The issue is ”Gholdengo“ is the only Pokémon with the ability Good as Gold.
Thus, what needs to happen is for Gholdengo to be ban, until the game releases a new Pokémon with the same ability.
Once, A new Pokémon comes out with the same ability as Gholdengo, we can monitor & compare how the new Pokémon does in the meta.
If the new Pokémon completely shuts down Defog similar, Than we will truly know for sure that the Ability was broken and not Gholdengo.
Gholdengo should then be allowed to rejoin OU just with out his ability.
If the new Pokémon doesn’t shut down Defog, Than we will truly know for sure that Gholdengo was broken and not Ability.
Gholdengo would than stay in Ubers.
NOW LET ME ASK YOU ALL A QUESTION
Do you think Gholdengo would be as popular as he is if he didn’t have the ability Good as Gold?
3rd - I want to Nominate a Quick Ban for the Move Shed Tail.
Once again, I agree with the Council Decision to not ban Cyclizar.
I believe Cyclizar isn’t ban worthy.
What I think is Ban Worthy is Cyclizard move Shed Tail.
Shed Tail is absolutely broken in every sense of the word.
Shed Tail has turned the Regular move Substitute as we know it and transformed it into Substitute on Steroids.
Powerful Sweepers & Wall Breakers which use the move Substitute did so at the cost of their own health & move pool.
- The Reduction in Health reduced the longevity of the Powerful Sweepers or Wall Breakers.
Allowing Players the option of potentially using Revenge Killers with Priority moves to finish it off after being weakened.
- The Move Substitute in the Move Pool of a Sweeper reduces the Lens of all the Pokémon it can destroy.
Allowing Players the option of potentially having an Effective Counter.
Shed Tail uses the Health Pool & Move Pool of a completely different Pokémon to make a Sub.
Than passes the Sub. to the Powerful Sweeper or Wall Breaker.
Full Health Sweeper - Which completely invalidates the possibility of revenge killing with priority.
3rd Move Pool Slot - Which pressures a player’s roster of possible checks.
Now, The move Shed Tail is on 2 Pokémon Cyclizar & Orthworm.
I believe both of these Pokémon are not Ban Worthy.
I think they are good Pokémon, but not Godlike.
I think the move Shed Tail is Godlike.
I think the move Shed Tail should be Ban.
NOW LET ME ASK YOU ALL A QUESTION
If Cyclizar was Ban tomorrow, Do you think Shed Tail would fall off the Map?
Or
Do you think the players using Cyclizar would delete him from their roster and add Orthworm in his place to keep abusing Shed Tail some more?
In my eyes, Any Ban to Cyclizar or Orthworm individually would make no difference.
I think the real Culprit is the move.
The mere fact players use Cyclizar more vs. Orthworm is simply happenstance.
Cyclizar happens to have little more Health vs. Orthworm to make slightly fatter Subs.
Cyclizar happens to have little more Speed vs. Orthworm to make set up sweeps slightly faster.
4th - I want to Nominate a Quick Ban for the New Gen 9 Terra. Mechanic.
I believe Pokémon being able to Change Typing at a moment notice in a Battle is Fundamentally Flawed and destroys everything Pokemon has tried to accomplish for the past 20 years.
I wish I knew the imbecile responsible for creating the Terra. Mechanic.
They should be fired and ban from all Official Pokémon events.
Honestly, Do you know who I feel sorry for the most?
The Smogon Strategy Pokédex Authors.
Gen 8 - Arcanine Checks & Counters on Smogon Strategy Pokédex:
Wait till the Authors make Arcanine Gen 9 Check & Counters, You can almost image it can’t you?
Water-types: Offensive Water-types like Starmie and Blastoise are the hardest for Arcanine to deal with, until he Terra Electric and Completely Destroys you with a Electric Terra Blast move.
How fabulous!
I can’t wait to see it.
How do you peeps they will do it?
Will they put a warning label at the end of each Check & Counter list?
Will they put a warning label at the beginning of each Check & Counter list?
Will they write a single 1 liner sentence? —-> Checks & Counters - They don’t exist this Generation, Thanks Game Freak!
Its funny to think about because of how sad the situation is.
Oh, well I ranted long enough.
I think 2 Pokémon are not enough.
Frankly, I think the Council is being to passive in Banning these Broken Pokémon, Moves, or Mechanics.
I think the Council needs to be more aggressive in their Ban’s.
1st - I want to Nominate a Quick Ban for Dragonpult.
The Below Screenshot is taking directly Gen 8 PokémonDex.
Several Pokemon who are “Dragonpult” Checks & Counters are not out in the game.
In addition, The Person who wrote the Checks & Counters named several Pokémon then said those checks are not really checks if Dragonpult is running other move set variation? WTF
I want to know who Hard switches into Dragonpult? Blissey?
Is it Iron Bundle all over again?
It is my understanding that the Councils Goal with Quick Bans is to take the blatant strong Pokémon out of OU which restricts Team Building.
I want to know how many Pokémon actually Hard Counter Dragonpult
Generation 8 - Dragonpult might have been ok because they had several Pokémon options which could collectively deal with him.
Generation 9 - We lack a lot of Pokémon and I haven’t seen anyone talk about any New Pokémon which Counter Dragonpult.
Has the day come when Dragonpult has simply because to strong for OU?
I think Dragonpult is very Oppressive.
I feel Dragonpult should be Quick Ban.
Look at all the things Dragonpult has going for it:
- Fastest Speed in the OU Tier
- Strong Offensive Moves
- Strong Typings
- A Lack of Defensive Checks due to the fact most of his Checks & Counters are not out, yet
2nd - I want to Nominate a Quick Ban for the Ability Good as Gold (Which is Gholdengo ability)
The Council did a vote on Gholdengo and found him not Ban Worthy.
I completely agree with the Council Gholdengo isn’t Ban Worthy!
What I think is Ban Worthy is Gholdengo Ability Good as Gold.
See what I did there guys? I found the Technicality.
I want to bring evidence of Good as Gold Ability being OverPowered!.
I want to clear up a misconception people have been saying which could have influenced the Council’s Decision.
Players in the forum keep saying the amount of Hazard Removal Pokémon are limited.
This is a fat out lie!
The below screenshot shows 14 different Defogger in the game.
We can clearly see there isn’t a lack of Defogging Hazard Removal.
The issue is the Ability Good as Gold is completely shutting down Defog.
1 ability outright shutting down 14 Pokémon.
Is that not oppressive and overpowered?
Gholdengo is an average Pokémon at best.
Gholdengo isn’t Ban worthy.
The Ability Good as Gold is a Godlike ability.
The Ability Good as Gold is Ban worthy.
The issue is ”Gholdengo“ is the only Pokémon with the ability Good as Gold.
Thus, what needs to happen is for Gholdengo to be ban, until the game releases a new Pokémon with the same ability.
Once, A new Pokémon comes out with the same ability as Gholdengo, we can monitor & compare how the new Pokémon does in the meta.
If the new Pokémon completely shuts down Defog similar, Than we will truly know for sure that the Ability was broken and not Gholdengo.
Gholdengo should then be allowed to rejoin OU just with out his ability.
If the new Pokémon doesn’t shut down Defog, Than we will truly know for sure that Gholdengo was broken and not Ability.
Gholdengo would than stay in Ubers.
NOW LET ME ASK YOU ALL A QUESTION
Do you think Gholdengo would be as popular as he is if he didn’t have the ability Good as Gold?
3rd - I want to Nominate a Quick Ban for the Move Shed Tail.
Once again, I agree with the Council Decision to not ban Cyclizar.
I believe Cyclizar isn’t ban worthy.
What I think is Ban Worthy is Cyclizard move Shed Tail.
Shed Tail is absolutely broken in every sense of the word.
Shed Tail has turned the Regular move Substitute as we know it and transformed it into Substitute on Steroids.
Powerful Sweepers & Wall Breakers which use the move Substitute did so at the cost of their own health & move pool.
- The Reduction in Health reduced the longevity of the Powerful Sweepers or Wall Breakers.
Allowing Players the option of potentially using Revenge Killers with Priority moves to finish it off after being weakened.
- The Move Substitute in the Move Pool of a Sweeper reduces the Lens of all the Pokémon it can destroy.
Allowing Players the option of potentially having an Effective Counter.
Shed Tail uses the Health Pool & Move Pool of a completely different Pokémon to make a Sub.
Than passes the Sub. to the Powerful Sweeper or Wall Breaker.
Full Health Sweeper - Which completely invalidates the possibility of revenge killing with priority.
3rd Move Pool Slot - Which pressures a player’s roster of possible checks.
Now, The move Shed Tail is on 2 Pokémon Cyclizar & Orthworm.
I believe both of these Pokémon are not Ban Worthy.
I think they are good Pokémon, but not Godlike.
I think the move Shed Tail is Godlike.
I think the move Shed Tail should be Ban.
NOW LET ME ASK YOU ALL A QUESTION
If Cyclizar was Ban tomorrow, Do you think Shed Tail would fall off the Map?
Or
Do you think the players using Cyclizar would delete him from their roster and add Orthworm in his place to keep abusing Shed Tail some more?
In my eyes, Any Ban to Cyclizar or Orthworm individually would make no difference.
I think the real Culprit is the move.
The mere fact players use Cyclizar more vs. Orthworm is simply happenstance.
Cyclizar happens to have little more Health vs. Orthworm to make slightly fatter Subs.
Cyclizar happens to have little more Speed vs. Orthworm to make set up sweeps slightly faster.
4th - I want to Nominate a Quick Ban for the New Gen 9 Terra. Mechanic.
I believe Pokémon being able to Change Typing at a moment notice in a Battle is Fundamentally Flawed and destroys everything Pokemon has tried to accomplish for the past 20 years.
I wish I knew the imbecile responsible for creating the Terra. Mechanic.
They should be fired and ban from all Official Pokémon events.
Honestly, Do you know who I feel sorry for the most?
The Smogon Strategy Pokédex Authors.
Gen 8 - Arcanine Checks & Counters on Smogon Strategy Pokédex:
Wait till the Authors make Arcanine Gen 9 Check & Counters, You can almost image it can’t you?
Water-types: Offensive Water-types like Starmie and Blastoise are the hardest for Arcanine to deal with, until he Terra Electric and Completely Destroys you with a Electric Terra Blast move.
How fabulous!
I can’t wait to see it.
How do you peeps they will do it?
Will they put a warning label at the end of each Check & Counter list?
Will they put a warning label at the beginning of each Check & Counter list?
Will they write a single 1 liner sentence? —-> Checks & Counters - They don’t exist this Generation, Thanks Game Freak!
Its funny to think about because of how sad the situation is.
Oh, well I ranted long enough.
Skill floor and skill ceiling are two very different things.
A reasonable skill floor is fine if the skill ceiling is to the sky. When the difference is more narrow then there isn't really much skill.
I think your point about being motivated to get better is a great example of why a skill cap and keeping the metagame competitive is a good thing.
If the metagame keeps broken things in it, thus lowering the level of competitiveness and increasing the level of variance, then naturally lesser players will simply spam the most broken strategies to maintain their chances and best footing. In a competitive, evolving environment, people are motivated to grow with or even ahead of the metagame and fellow players, boosting their own competency and skillset. This is why the skill cap being high to a certain degree is important, why bans are important, and so on.
bro, 12/14 of those mons were low tier before good as gold was added to the game.. scizor can do it and corv would be the 100% slapped on every team defogger.
I'm not against testing him but the viable defogger pool is shallow as ever and I find it hard to reasonably ban it because the 1 not-shitmon defogger can't defog. That's why I'm personally on the fence cause its either knight is mandatory to deal with hazards due to lack of removal, or ghoul is mandatory to keep them up, idk which is worse which i'd need a suspect test to read through to sway one way or the other.
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