Playing the ursaluna suspect test really made me think about how broken terastalization really was. Throughout the whole suspect, I was barely enjoying playing through it, and I was not really enjoying it at all in the first 20-25 games, if at all. I’ve always been a pro tera user. It enables more metagame development, and more fun when it comes to the team building as you can have a lot more variety. But all of that really changed when I started playing the suspect test. Throughout the most of the ladder, I used a psyspam team that I had some success with on the high ladder before the suspect. It was going well, and I managed to get a good 27-0 run before losing to some bad matchups and misplays. But i wasn’t enjoying playing the suspect. On my other suspect accounts, I had just been blown away, and was considering to take a break and get the reqs at the end of the suspect, or to not even get reqs at all. This meta just felt really heinous to me. And it all had to do with terastallization.
My main problem with terastallization is that it breaks a core mechanic. Typings and type matchups have existed ever since generation 1. Grass beats water, water beats fire and fire beats grass. However, terastallization changes this. Now, water can beat any type it wants. If it wants to beat a dragon, it can terastallization into a fairy type and click tera blast. One of the big reasons that ursaluna, the suspected pokemon is as broken as it is, is due to tera. You can no longer toxic it. You can no longer use a grass type to beat a ground type and you can no longer rely on counterplay, which previously had always existed in past gens.
There is no reason for a polteageist to be able to beat kingambit. There is no reason for a sneasler to be immune to earthquake. Tera just creates a heinous type of mind games. If you close combat the opposing kingambit when it teras, you lose. If you ice spinner and they tera, you win. This was more fine in the pre home meta. There weren’t any big threats barring stuff like kingambit, and you could still play around those big tera abusers. Now however, we have a whole new meta. A lot of the new broken pokemon would not function the same with tera. You can maybe claim a kill or two with bloodmoon until meowscarada comes out to revenge kill it, unlike the meta with terastallization. Now you can simply tera poison on the meowscarada, and now it’s helpless.
A big reason that so many pokemon uses encore is that there isn’t a lot of other counterplay. How are you planning on beating a shell smashed polteageist with tera? You basically can’t if you don’t have something such as a ting lu. That’s why encore is such a big move. You can now encore the polteageist into shell smash and then ko it before it’s unable to do something else. You can’t rely on a kingambit to beat it. If it was generation 8, a polteageist would never stay in on a bisharp, but now it’s a favorable matchup for polteageist in gen 9. Yes, you can also terastallize yourself and try to beat it. Maybe you tera fairy on the opposing tera blast and manage to win the trade, But that isn’t a sign of a good metagame. It’s a case of “broken beats broken” with the broken thing being the same.
I’d rather play a meta where I know that my meowscarada can safely ko the opposing ursaluna without having to scout for a tera just to lose another pokemon to see that it hasn’t terastallized. A pokemon already has a ton of variety. It can run any item it wants, any move it gets, a ton of different EV spreads and more. Giving a pokemon more flexibility just isn’t needed.
Historically, a lot of pokemon has been banned due to terastallization. There have been outliers in the beginning of the meta, such as chi yu or palafin which just used tera to boost them even stronger, but looking at pokemon such as volcarona, annihilape, or regieleki, the problem becomes quite clear.
The metagame has been aging for over a year soon, and the most recent tera suspect we’ve had was early december last year. With every new addition to the metagame, there comes more broken threats, and with dlc 2, that pattern is likely to repeat itself.
The meta has evolved enough since the last suspect test, and terastallization definitely deserves to be looked at, or suspected tested in the near future.
