Announcement Urshifu-Rapid-Strike & Volcarona are banned from SV OU

[Finchinator]

The SV OU tiering council conducted a vote on the remaining items on the tiering radar this week. This will be the final radar and council vote for the time being as we likely pivot to suspects moving forward.

	Finchinator	Ruft	ausma	ima	mind gaming	NJNP	Star	TPP	xavgb
Light Clay	Do not ban	Do not ban	Do not ban	Do not ban	Ban	Do not ban	Do not ban	Do not ban	Do not ban
Sneasler	Do not ban	Do not ban	Do not ban	Do not ban	Ban	Ban	Ban	Ban	Do not ban
Ursaluna	Do not ban	Do not ban	Do not ban	Do not ban	Do not ban	Do not ban	Do not ban	Do not ban	Do not ban
Urshifu-R	Ban	Ban	Ban	Ban	Ban	Ban	Ban	Ban	Ban
Volcarona	Ban	Ban	Ban	Do not ban	Ban	Ban	Do not ban	Ban	Ban
Zamazenta-H	Ban	Ban	Do not ban	Ban	Do not ban	Do not ban	Ban	Ban	Do not ban

The takeaways are as follows:

• Urshifu-Rapid-Strike is banned unanimously due to a 9-0 council vote.
• Volcarona is banned with a supermajority due to a 7-2 council vote.
• Zamazenta-Hero received a majority, but not the supermajority needed (2/3 or higher); we will likely be suspect testing Zamazenta-Hero during the upcoming week given how close it was.
• Sneasler (4 ban, 5 do not ban), Light Clay (1 ban, 8 do not ban), and Ursaluna (0 ban, 9 do not ban) all remain legal in SV OU.

Upon being added to generation nine through Pokemon HOME, Urshifu-Rapid-Strike was one of the best offensive presences. It gained access to the move Swords Dance and the item Punching Gloves, which both bolster its offensive profile a great deal. It also can now use Terastallization and even has access to Trailblaze, making it a far better option than it was last generation.

The dual STAB combination of Surging Strikes and Close Combat when boosted by a Swords Dance or Choice Band is very challenging to stop, forcing people to use one of the small pool of resists. Offensive counterplay does admittedly exist in this case. Some faster foes can be dispatched of by Aqua Jet or even a now faster Urshifu-Rapid-Strike if it opts to run the rare Trailblaze, but these still leave it susceptible to many of the quickest Pokemon. Revenge killing as a whole is still possible thanks to things like Dragapult, who can also stomach a single hit, or Enamorus, Iron Valiant, and Walking Wake, who can take it out while outpacing it. The thing is that many of this counterplay involves foddering something off or high-risk pivoting to enable, making Urshifu-Rapid-Strike already carry its weight to even get to this point.

This whole "playing around Urshifu concept" is a very dangerous tightrope to toe as one wrong maneuver can lead to something being taken out. The true trouble Urshifu-Rapid-Strike poses is the lack of consistent defensive counterplay, which caused it's unanimous quickban. Toxapex with the right moves and spread can help minimize most Urshifu-Rapid-Strike variants, but otherwise we have to resort to otherwise mediocre options like Amoonguss, Slowbro, and Water Absorb Clodsire, which is an insufficient pool of overall counterplay to anything. Teambuilding is warped and the metagame is pushed to be far more aggressive as a result of this dynamic. Another method of trying to check Urshifu-Rapid-Strike is exhausting your Terastallization on surprising it defensively, but this can be pivoted out of and has to be lined-up perfectly with things like Tera Fairy Volcanion, Tera Water or Grass Volcarona, Tera Water Gholdengo, or Tera Water Ursaluna. This is not seen as a reliable method of counterplay and can come at a very large cost if it is not timed well. Given this, Urshifu-Rapid-Strike has been banned unanimously.



Volcarona has been near the center of tiering discussions for quite a few months now, predating Pokemon HOME. Unfortunately, the uncertainty surrounding HOME's release date left us unable to suspect things like it, Garganacl, or Kingambit, who drew the ire of many players. To make matters even more concerning, Volcarona came out after the release of Pokemon HOME and arguably got even stronger as it employed a wider, more practical array of Tera types and was able to focus on offensive variants as the developing metagame trended in that direction. Many people argue that terror of Volcarona is more of a mechanical issue with the core of the metagame, but that is a discussion that cannot be tackled just by a single council vote and will be brought up to the community for a greater discussion in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we are left to focus on Volcarona in the current metagame.

A lot of people assumed it would remain in the tier as it has been a staple in OU dating back to generation 5 despite always being one of the best win conditions, but new benefits such as Heavy-Duty Boots from last generation and Terastallization made it different here arguably. With this said, it did not receive any support last vote, so what changed? To put it simply, the metagame did. We were all focused on new toys so much last week as we had two votes surrounding them within the span of 3-4 days, so Volcarona, while very good and hard to reliably counter, was not at the forefront of discussions. However, once the dust settled on those bans, Volcaronan not only had a greater place in the metagame, but it also drew far more attention and we had more time to analyze how it functioned. I explained this dynamic from my perspective here and why my vote flipped over the last week from do not ban to ban. However, many councilmen spoke as to why they found Volcarona problematic this week. Here are quotes from all of their posts:

On the upcoming tiering radar, it is likely we include again despite it not getting support last time. In addition, I personally plan to vote ban on Volcarona this weekend and I think others within the council are discussing/considering their options as well. My guess is that it stays OU, but as a community we should seriously assess this Pokemon and its antics a bit further moving forward.

Volcarona was drowned out a bit by the hype of new toys and the overbearing nature of the first couple of broken Pokemon perhaps, but it has retained and arguably gained viability and effectiveness with the transition from pre-HOME to post-HOME.

I already believed that Volcarona was broken prior to HOME, but it was so close that we never had time for a formal suspect test on it. Now we have a fresh metagame, but it has adapted with Tera Water or even Tera Ground offensively while even occasionally running Tera Ghost for ESpeed revenge killers.

Offensively, it can handpick its own counters. Scared of Heatran walking normal moves? Tera Water and Tera Ground do the trick. Skeledirge falls into the same boat, of course. Scared of revenge killers with priority? You can run Substitute for Sucker Punch or Tera Ghost for ESpeed as I mentioned before while hardly any scarfers do the trick after a Quiver Dance. Even things like Clodsire can lose to Substitute + Tera Grass, but at least this and bulkier variants have fallen out of favor with Heatran’s release. Given this, there is at least some counterplay and some intuition that can allow for eliminating some options or forming a hypothesis as to what Tera and set it may be. But is: that enough? I don’t really think so.

Yes, Tera is the overall problem here, but it’s not being reassessed for a little longer. Yes, Zama-H and maybe a few others are also just as, if not even more, problematic. But we need to consider changing the narrative on Volcarona. It’s unreasonable right now.

(This is a rushed post, excuse grammar)

I intend to be voting ban on Volcarona

. I've found the Pokemon to be rather uncompetitive for months and home hasn't really changed that...in fact it has made things worse with how Volcarona has adapted its tera and certain checks no longer are able to handle it. I've been discussing this for weeks internally and amongst peers, I pushed heavily for Volcarona to be on the previous radar and now I will be pulling the trigger on voting to ban it. I find this is the most match-up skewed Pokemon and has been from the start of the tier, sure Tera makes it broken but heading into WCOP as we all know we aren't touching Tera until it has concluded. With the new additions Volc has not gotten worse at all, it's performing just as well maybe even better than it did pre-home.

For example, we were using Cinderace, AV Pex, Banded D Nite, etc as measures to it, and don't get me wrong it could still get past those but players would prefer to run other sets due to various other metagame consistencies in the tier. Now, tera water/ground Volc is very common with the presence of Heatran, Slowking-G, and resisting those power jets from Basc-M and Shifu Stike. Along with the lack of toxic distribution really has most builders I'd imagine thrown for a loop on how to prepare for it. I feel it currently is in the same lane as Shifu-R as it has the tools to just pick its counters and just muscle through them and that is really impossible to prep for in the SV tera metagame.

I'd also like to mention unlike previous generations most viable scarfers currently either don't have a strong enough move to revenge it, are outsped by it after a quiver dance, or simply don't have a safe move to click vs it due to the potential tera implications...leaves most builders grasping for straws, using soft checks like Ting Lu to hopefully put themselves in a position late game where it won't be able to clean their plate.


https://pokepast.es/cbda9b34e367ec29 - Here's a fun team provided by Vert so you can abuse volcarona as well

Hi again, over the last couple of hours I've been in OU Council attempting to detail my full thoughts on Volcarona in this generation. Since it is already formatted pretty neatly for a Smogon post, I thought I would copy paste what I said into this thread (some of the paragraph breaks may look a bit awkward because Discord messages have a 2000 character limit).


stresh — Today at 16:55
general thoughts on volc in the last 7 months that still mostly apply post-home:

• imo the big difference that has been caused by a variety of factors in this gen is that the practicality of volc sets has increased massively. The way I've seen it for a while is that you can basically always run morning sun + boots on volc and still pick and choose your counters in this gen. I think you pretty much cannot go wrong with QD/Flame/Morning Sun/Tera Blast with whatever tera type hits a few of the mons that can try to kill you back.

This is a significant upgrade on old gens volc where it had to go to obscure coverage or item slots like gen 8 LO Volc in order to get the same effect. Being able to run Boots Morning Sun/bulkier spreads etc allows it to have more general utility to compensate for the matchups where it doesnt win. On top of that, the nature of tera metagames means that the offensive teams volc is typically found on find it easier to get away with teamslots that may have some weak matchups - if volc isnt gonna win, there's probably still something else on the team that can tera and break through shit.

• My policy throughout pre-home was usually one check for Tera Blast Fairy and Will-o-Wisp with a secondary that prevents losing to Tera Ground (this can be a generally bulky mon not weak to Fire/Ground or some prio combination). Ftr I hated having to do this and I'm not sure I would have put up with it if it wasnt for the fact that some of the checks were just really good in general (like Dnite and the fires), combined with the fact that the meta was just annoying in many ways related to not having much choice in mons.

It's worth noting that Volc continued adapting even through this. Tera Ground started to fall off towards the end of pre-Home as its previous best matchup (fat balance) started running Dondozo, and it found itself generally weaker into the multiple prio offenses and bulky offenses that ran the rest of the meta.

Something that popped up late in that meta which was usually much better suited than Tera Ground Volc was Tera Rock. You could essentially run the same set I mentioned earlier (QD Flame Tera Blast recovery) and achieve a hybrid of the best matchups of Tera Fairy and Tera Ground, killing Bax, owning CB Dnite in a lot of situations, and still wiping Fires and Tera Fires off the face of the earth. If that set had existed a few months earlier it would have had many more drawbacks in relation to Tera Ground, as Clodsire still existed, and Pex still ran Toxic. I'm not sure how likely it is that we'll consistently have enough of the "answers" to Volc accessible at the same time - I'm pretty convinced at this point that there's always going to be at least one very strong Volc set, probably multiple at most points in the meta. In this sense, I dont think meta adaptation will be enough to save the mon. That being said, there have been some constants within the meta that make Volc's life harder than the first few paragraphs would suggest. Firstly, prio mons and generally bulky mons have been everywhere for most of the gen. One of the things that has made certain teras awkward to click is the sequence of blowing your tera too early to take a kill -> getting revenged/forced out -> being stuck with an awkward type on a not particularly bulky mon, saddling you with a weird disadvantage as your tera is already gone. This can be avoided to an extent if you make sure to run the most practical sets at the time (i.e. ones best into bulky offense/offense with prio), but it's always a concern like with any early tera. General specially bulky mons like Ting-Lu and some variants of Gking can provide stop-gap switchins which, although they may technically lose on their own, are often able to delay volc sweeps until it's no longer feasible to pull off. Another thing that comes up a lot for me when using Volc is how flimsy its defensive utility really is.

The main defensive draw of Volcarona is being able to come in on Valiant/Ghold/sometimes Gambit or Zamazenta. Unfortunately, whenever you try to actually make the plays to act as a check to these things throughout the game, you open yourself up to various things going wrong. Booster Energy Valiant can break through regular Volc with both Cm and SD variants, often forcing you into the trade earlier than you actually wanted to make it. Gambit is a pretty risky thing to even try switching in on, but I have seen cases of people trying (Yelodash vs MrBanana from wcop quals comes to mind). Zamazenta can pretty easily run Stone Edge which is another thing that gets in the way of your pre-Tera defensive utility. The combined factors from the last two paragraphs can make Volc really annoying to use as well as really annoying to play against. It generally feels like this mon creates a lot of variance whichever side you're on, which I guess is a point against it being in the meta, even if the chips often land against Volc's favour. I've written a lot here partially because I find it difficult to accurately describe what Volcarona's impact on the meta ends up looking like, and also because there are some aspects that I'm curious about in the post-Home meta compared to the pre-Home meta. For the later stages of the pre-Home meta, you could kinda rely on most teams at least having a Kingambit in terms of prio users, and usually 1-2 extra things that can prevent a Volc sweep. Nowadays with the greater variety, you might find more priority users available, but the combined usage of relevant anti-Volc priority might have gone down. It's hard to know how factors like this shake out early into the metagame. On top of this, we've just had screens go from a pretty irrelevant playstyle pre-Home to one of the main HO styles post-Home, and this can alleviate a lot of Volc's old weaknesses. Even with everything laid out in words, I'm still unsure of what to do with Volc.

The final thing I wanted to mention is the general state of the metagame and how it relates to Volc. There's no doubt in my mind that Volc invites guessing games in a Tera metagame, or that it heavily encourages a lot of prio and anti-setup on your teams, or that it introduces these negative factors into games a lot more regularly than it did in previous generations. Despite this, I find myself looking at the metagame and wondering if this is almost an inevitability. There are definitely some positive skills that can both be associated with dealing with Volcarona AND dealing with the rest of the metagame. For example, the situations I mentioned when it comes to dealing with surprise Volc teras do also apply when it comes to dealing with greedy early teras (with short-term high reward). The general uncertainty around what Tera you're supposed to be playing around can still be found in many other mons, and even though these other mons have less variety in good tera types, when considered collectively this metagame state looks to label an understanding of weighted guesswork and complex risk reward tables as a key skill. Having played this gen at a high level very consistently, I can say that these aspects can definitely be described as skill - I mean this in the sense that there's still a reasonable idea of "generally better choices" and "generally worse choices", and if you repeat the generally better choice over a large portion of games you will get a better winrate. However, I don't think this automatically makes the skillset of the current meta a good one to be rewarding. This is the only meta where "I did the right thing and lost this particular game because of it" is a somewhat regular sentiment that I find upon analyzing my losses - usually what happens in other tiers is either "I did a bad thing in the builder or game and got punished" or "I did the right thing and the RNG didn't pan out". I'm unsure of how to handle a generation like this tiering-wise. Do you

a) Aim to reduce the most egregious offenders for these negative aspects for the meta and leave the rest be
b) Aim to remove the source of bad interactions in the first place so that they can be replaced with more reliable forms of skill expression
c) Try and let the dumb aspects of the generation harmonise with each other so that there is still a clear general trend of what skill looks like in the metagame, while accepting that it's not an ideal form of skill expression (i.e. "it's the charm of the gen" argument)

Personally I'm more in favour of b), and I think that this means ban tera. But it's not like a) and c) are unheard of strategies. Based on my limited experience of Gen 7 i'd say a) and c) describe most of Gen 7's tiering, whereas Gen 8 kinda avoided this conundrum by being a gen where the most broken things were broken mons (that subsequently got banned) and Dynamax which got banned very early.

(In reply to a statement by njnp about tera)

it's kinda like RNG management except RNG management is fixed and calculable
and tera guessing has way more vibes
I was very close to Tera darking in my endgame vs lusa's bax
cause like to me it'd be the logical choice to at least have eq
and then a fairly reasonable choice to be Tera Ground if it was eq
but as it happens it was the fucking no coverage for steels set that some people liked for some reason
If I had tera dark kowtow'd and been hit with Tera Dragon glaive (as he clicked in the game) i would have lost my mind
I essentially lucked into the right play there and it's not even really my fault that it went down that way
and that's like a relatively simple 2v2 endgame (at least when it comes to identifying the possibilities)

To continue discussing council discussion of Volcarona and why it will be included in the next radar, I wanted to briefly give my 2 cents on the matter.

Volcarona, to me, is a Pokemon whose versatility is mostly dictated by the current state of Tera in SV OU. Most of Volcarona's strength centers quite heavily around Volcarona's versatile applications of Tera, Tera Blast being able to augment its coverage seamlessly, and Volcarona being able to take advantage of nothing turns better than other Pokemon, which type shifting can create more of. I do believe that their degree of strength and Volcarona's set options are primarily enabled by unpredictability, and while this is because of Tera, I believe that Volcarona is moreso optimized at exploiting it compared to other Pokemon in the tier to where it stands out as a special case to me.

I personally have not had as damning experiences as others with Volcarona, primarily due to my building habits, though adapting to a Pokemon that is so heavily leveraged by unpredictability is a very unreasonable ask in a metagame so driven by a need for role compression. If Tera is restricted or removed from the tier it should be freed imo, since it does have a genuinely awesome and useful resistance profile into Iron Valiant and Enamorus that pairs well with Flame Body to enable progress into contact-based attackers like Great Tusk or Kingambit at the same time. These have some healthy merits in the metagame imo that wouldn't be usurped by the degree of unpredictability that unrestricted Tera currently enables for it.

Provided all of this reasoning, Volcarona was banned from SV OU with 7 of 9 votes in favor.

We intend to move forward with suspects, and the first one will likely be Zamazenta-Hero, who fell one vote short of a ban. Stay tuned for this.

Tagging Kris and Marty to implement the bans of Volcarona and Urshifu-Rapid-Strike. Thank you!